Life Events Quotes

“Not everything that matters to you will matter to the people you leave behind.”
― Karolina Waclawiak, Life Events

“My mother died on September 22, 2019, just as I was finishing work on this book. As my brother beautifully wrote in his eulogy for her, “She was a true matriarch, a Jupiter in stature, and we were simply the moons lucky enough to orbit her, to be shaped by her gravity, and without her we are left with a space impossible to fill or inhabit.” I could not have captured the immense loss of her any better.”
― Karolina Waclawiak, Life Events

“I thought about what would happen when I stopped hearing their voices. What I would do when the messages ceased to come.”
― Karolina Waclawiak, Life Events

“I forgive you for not knowing what you want, still.”
― Karolina Waclawiak, Life Events

“Because I wanted to be seen, and not seen at all.”
― Karolina Waclawiak, Life Events

“The other, I am no one, often took hold if you were ignored. Or felt unloved no matter what you did. The result could be needing to be seen, or wanting to be heard. No amount of being seen can satiate you when your prevailing sense of self is I am no one.”
― Karolina Waclawiak, Life Events

“And with no phone service of any kind, nothing could hurt me, either. I didn’t have to anticipate a phone call beckoning me to a hospital room, because one wouldn’t come if I stayed up there. And so I began seeking out places where I was unreachable.”
― Karolina Waclawiak, Life Events

“Self-preservation is a funny thing: in order to survive, you do things that ultimately hurt your chance of survival.”
― Karolina Waclawiak, Life Events

“I have always subscribed to ‘I alone can fix this. I don’t need anyone. I don’t need you,’” I said. “Because I don’t know how to be a ‘we.”
― Karolina Waclawiak, Life Events

“In all of this I have discovered that I don’t know how to be a ‘we,’” I said.”
― Karolina Waclawiak, Life Events

“Unfair or not, I felt superior in that moment. I was avoiding this pain by not participating.”
― Karolina Waclawiak, Life Events

“We’re just here for a human experience. And maybe that human experience is just to learn one thing. For me, it’s learning how to forgive. Like, someone has a life with terrible parents or something, and maybe all I was supposed to do was learn to forgive them and maybe a handful of people who came after them. And that’s it. Then I can move on to whatever’s next for me. That was what I came here for.”
― Karolina Waclawiak, Life Events

“When he answered, he looked very much alive, though he had the kind of dark circles under his eyes that made me believe he stared at the ceiling most nights, too.”
― Karolina Waclawiak, Life Events

“I don’t sleep, really. Night is when I really know I’m dying.”
― Karolina Waclawiak, Life Events

“What you have isn’t contagious,” I said. “No one wants to be around sick people. They don’t want to catch the sadness.”
― Karolina Waclawiak, Life Events

“I looked down at where Pierre’s dog bed had been and noticed he had left a hairball behind.”
― Karolina Waclawiak, Life Events

“I didn’t have cable anymore, so I spent my nights wandering my apartment looking for things to clean. It was an immaculate space no one ever came to see.”
― Karolina Waclawiak, Life Events

“He smiled at me, a “bear with us” smile.”
― Karolina Waclawiak, Life Events

“They were my age, but appeared to have done all the right things.”
― Karolina Waclawiak, Life Events

“What no one tells you is that a single woman at a dinner party is, more often than not, seen as a threat.”
― Karolina Waclawiak, Life Events

“we missed the real final moments that indicated the end. It was like people’s fixation with the final fight of a marriage: the end had come long before that final fissure, yet people always wanted to know what the breaking point was.”
― Karolina Waclawiak, Life Events

“She said big life changes like this weren’t uncommon because what we did was clarifying.”
― Karolina Waclawiak, Life Events

“There is something to be said about being the person who gets to move on in a new place—to start fresh, as people like to say. Meanwhile, the person who has chosen to stay behind is trapped among remnants of a familiar and distant life as they try to piece together a new way of being in an apartment that was once inhabited by someone they loved, or maybe even still love.”
― Karolina Waclawiak, Life Events

“which seemed like it had come quickly and not quickly enough at all.”
― Karolina Waclawiak, Life Events

“Leaving is the initial rush of having your own space and your own time and your own life, but with an absence that feels so vast that it is literally unquantifiable.”
― Karolina Waclawiak, Life Events

“No one had taught either of us how to be an adult who bought a house, so we floundered in our one-bedroom apartment.”
― Karolina Waclawiak, Life Events

“When one person in a marriage is unsure who to be, both people become unmoored, losing any sense of rhythm.”
― Karolina Waclawiak, Life Events

“I did what I could to push him further away, but I knew I would have to be the one to cleave us in two.”
― Karolina Waclawiak, Life Events

“A man I’d met once but did not sleep with told me we are all masochists and sadists wandering around looking for our opposite. He said, “What are you, then, a masochist or a sadist?”
― Karolina Waclawiak, Life Events

“Grief becomes ambient.”
― Karolina Waclawiak, Life Events