The Collected Regrets of Clover

by Mikki Brammer

New York is a city of lonely people full of regrets.

The most important thing is never to look away from someone’s pain.

There’s a reason I know this city’s full of lonely people. I’m one of them.

a nostalgia for what they considered to be their glory days. The time when more of their life was ahead than behind them.

When you grow up as an only child, you learn to inhabit your imagination almost as frequently as you do reality.

“It’s like the earth nourishes us while we’re living and then we nourish it when we die.”

I wondered if the answers to all hard questions lay in the bottom of a coffee cup.

Abigail’s sleep became eternal at 6:04 a.m.

“You know, I can’t understand why you keep your world so small. There are so many interesting people out there.”

I’d learned the hard way that when people ask you how you’re doing after a loved one’s death, they don’t really want to know. They want to hear that you’ve moved on because they can’t stand to look at your pain.

as if time could erase the potency of love.

That was the day that I began to realize how hard it is to be anything but what the world already thinks you are.

And for the next ten minutes we stood side by side, letting the raindrops tumble over our cheekbones.

“If you want something you don’t have,” he’d said, “you have to do something you’ve never done.”

We get stuck in a routine and we look at them as we’ve always looked at them, without seeing them for the person they’ve become or the person they strive to be. What a terrible thing to do to someone you love.”

Was I somehow less of a woman because I’d never had one to look up to?

it did make me miss the feeling of arriving in a foreign country with nothing but the unknown awaiting me.

With every brow that creased with censure, she’d slide her hands into her pockets and saunter by with happy defiance.

It’s easy to glamorize the path you didn’t take.

The two of them, lost in a world of their own. And me, alone in mine.

I missed the freedom of travel—observing the world and uncovering its magic, decoding its people, all while still enjoying my solitude. It nourished me in a way that nothing else did.

“Because every time I imagined dying, I would freak myself out by thinking about how that was it for me. You know, like, for the rest of eternity, I would no longer exist. And eventually, everyone who knew me would die, and then I’d be forgotten forever.

“Don’t worry, dear. When I don’t hear from you, I know it means you’re enjoying yourself. And that makes me very happy.”

It’d been a sad part of growing up when I realized that the answers to all hard questions didn’t really lie at the bottom of a coffee cup.

“The truth is, grief never really goes away. Someone told me once that it’s like a bag that you always carry—it starts out as a large suitcase, and as the years go by, it might reduce to the size of a purse, but you carry it forever.

‘While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.’

‘If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.’”

We are not meant to be in this lifetime . . . perhaps we will meet in another. I’ll keep you in my heart until then.

“Don’t let the best parts of life pass you by because you’re too scared of the unknown.” One last wink. “Be cautiously reckless.”

When living became a habit rather than a privilege and the years ticked by unnoticed.

Yes, she’d died with regrets, but she had still lived out loud, unafraid to take up space in the world, never losing her sense of adventure and playfulness.

Maybe the biggest risk in life was taking no risks at all.

“But the secret to a beautiful death is to live a beautiful life.

It’s so easy to see your parental figure through that lens alone, to think that their existence has always revolved around yours. But before they were parents, they were simply human beings trying to navigate life as best they could, dealing with their own disappointments, chasing after their own dreams. And yet we often expect them to be infallible.

Grief is just love looking for a place to settle.

The secret to a beautiful death is living a beautiful life.

The fact that all of us were entangled—that everyone on the planet somehow shaped the course of one another’s lives, often without realizing it—felt like almost too much for me to comprehend.

And instead of constantly asking ourselves the question of why we’re here, maybe we should be savoring a simpler truth: We are here.