We are in the twilight years of a long love affair, and it has recently occurred to me that a day will come when one of us buries the other. But, I remind myself, that is the happy ending to a story like ours. It is a vow made and kept. It is the only acceptable outcome to a long and happy marriage, and I am determined not to fear that day, whenever it arrives. I am equally determined to soak up all the days between 📔❄️

A pretty deception 🍐

Isabel had never known loneliness like that, one that arrived without the promise of leaving. There was no one now, no one to walk through the door unannounced, no one to open and close a drawer in the other room 🚪🍽️

Nicole was a lifelong Cincinnati Reds fan and could easily participate in banter about the current season, which charmed older men in a way she found irritating because their delight seemed to be rooted in surprise ⚾️💃🥃

You can always be better, she‘d said to me when we first met. But what was the point if you had everything and enjoyed nothing? ⛸️🖤

…but I knew I could run. I could always run. But running and escaping were not the same thing. I had to ask myself and answer honestly, How much do I want to be free? And I couldn‘t lose sight of my goal of freeing my family. What would freedom be without them? 🛶

I remember one day, on the porch, holding your hand, your unsick hand. I asked you where you wanted to go, what you wanted to do. You remember saying you just wanted to stay here for longer.

Take a break. A breath. That feeling when you don‘t want a novel to end but this.

Every word must count.

⏳

No woman is a star. No woman is a god or a tree or a magician. But for a while, in your arms, the universe was the right size, and I knew where I was 🤱

Promise me, no matter how old and boring you get, or where you go, or who you‘re with, you‘ll never stop looking for this 📸

It is all less beautiful, on the way down 🎶

Because suffering is required. To suffer is to strive and to set a bar so high that one never becomes complacent. To become complacent is to become lazy and to lose one‘s spirit to fight, and to lose one‘s spirit to fight is to die. So, to suffer is to live.

Not all the time, or often—just now and then—the light hits the pieces of colored glass just right, and for what may be just a fleeting moment, everything looks beautiful. If a person doesn‘t ask too many questions about what happened yesterday or what‘s going to happen next. If she can just look at this one brief moment in time, without asking for more 🫧

Maybe happy now, happy for a moment, is all we really get. Happy forever seems a shitload to ask in a world on fire 🪖🚁🇺🇸

At what point does it switch, and we wish we could turn the clock back instead of propel its hands forward?

I missed something I‘d lost a long time ago. Us being little girls. Together all the time.

🐈🏡❤️‍🩹

How was anybody supposed to calculate that one? What was her home worth? Everything, if a happy family lived in it. Otherwise, nothing 🌳💔

You hate spoilers in books and films. We both do. But when it comes to this, all we want, above anything else, is a spoiler. We desperately want the doctors to give us the spoiler, but they can‘t, because they don‘t know either ❤️‍🩹

We all tell you to move forward, but where exactly is forward? There‘s no other place we can go. To face the past is to momentarily turn your back on what is now. And when you do that, you miss so damn much 🕰️

People say it gets easier, but that‘s only because each day we get a little closer to seeing them again 🌈

I hope you‘re getting what you want from this life, too 🏕️🛶🌲

A lie well told, often enough told, began to eat one‘s memory. And over time, it became harder to say where the fiction ended and the truth began. And maybe if you lied long enough, you became a lie 📓🎬🫢

But we can‘t always be what we want every second. And that‘s okay. That‘s just life, you know? 💍💔

The beginning of a novel is like a first date. You hope from the first lines an urgent magic will take hold, and you will sink into the story like a hot bath, giving yourself over entirely 📖

Because that‘s all art is, in the end. One person trying to get another person they have never met to fall in love with them 📱

My favorite 2024 reads! 📚

For the first time in 6 years, I met my reading goal! My goal was 35, but I totaled 37 books for the year. With two littles (2.5 years and 5 months) and two jobs, I‘m really proud of myself. Although beating my challenge is nice, it‘s never my end goal. My ultimate goal is always to read daily and enjoy good books, simple and sweet ❤️

Here‘s to challenging myself to 40 reads for 2025, happy reading friends! 🤓

Maybe love is grief imploding. Or maybe it‘s love expanding. I don‘t know. I just know you can‘t create loss to preempt loss because it doesn‘t work that way. So you might as well love as much as you can. And as recklessly. Like it‘s your last resort, because it is 👙⛱️🦞

Thinking about that day, the dog running for the tennis ball, the pasta they ate together, the feeling wells up inside of him painfully. Wanting to say and hear the words again, that can never again be said or heard. To return to the house once more, and not find it dark and empty, but airy and bright again with open windows. To spend an afternoon together, playing with the dog, eating dinner, doing nothing, only being together, just once more 🏠

Nobody needs to live alone. You‘re just more comfortable that way. A little discomfort might do you good 🛋️

…and everyone wanted to be Allison‘s best friend. But for some reason, she chose Jane, the nerd, the new girl, the one who reads novels at the bus stop before school because she liked reading novels, but also because she hoped it might disguise the fact of how alone she was 📚

That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet 🌙

It is only when we truly know and understand that we have a limited time on Earth and that we have no way of knowing when our time is up that we begin to live each day to the fullest, as if it were the only one we had 🦋

My life has been filled with magical moments, I was just so busy waiting I didn‘t see them when they were here 💫

Protection and love are not the same thing. Love says, I will try and I will fail. Love says, Despite. Love says, And yet and yet and yet ♥️

Parenthood was a persistent cruelty, a constant, simultaneous desire to be together and apart 🤱

…how you‘d do anything for your kids to make sure they never feel alone 💛

It‘s only right then that you ever truly understand how big and unsearchable the world actually is—how it is far too big to find something in it that is really lost 🏭💵🪦

The whole purpose of sharing your life with another person might be for witnessing these moments together…All the small moments that are made strange or disquieting or beautiful when you see them with someone else 🇺🇸

Toby and Maryam are her perfect match, her proof that two imperfect people can make something work, something straightforward and good…Just two people who are happy with each other 🪜

Things always seem the worst just after they happen. Time will take care of this as time always does 🫐🪨

Tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it ☀️🦪

You never commit a mundane moment to memory, thinking it‘ll be the last time you‘ll hear their voice, or see their smile, or smell their perfume. Your head never remembers the things your heart wants it to in hindsight 💔

Life doesn‘t always go as planned. The trick is to make the most of it when it doesn‘t ✈️

That‘s just how friendships become in your thirties, I think as I head south. The love is still there, but the urgency for that constant companionship fades, replaced by something else—romantic partnerships, yes, but maybe we also just get tired 👯‍♀️

You don‘t let go once. That‘s your first mistake. You say goodbye over a lifetime. You might not have thought about her for ten years, then you‘ll hear a song or you‘ll walk past somewhere you once went together—something will come to the surface that you‘d totally forgotten about. And you say another goodbye. You have to be prepared to let go and let go and let go a thousand times 💔

I thought of the blissful mundanity of life; of what a privilege it was to live it ✨

Love is a quiet, reassuring, relaxing, pottering, pedantic, harmonious hum of a thing; something you can easily forget is there, even though its palms are outstretched beneath you in case you fall 💜

We marvel at a nectarine sunset or the smell of a baby‘s head…even though we know that everyone we love will cease to exist one day. I don‘t know how we do it 🥀

I‘m jealous of the way Poppy still thinks that everything she‘s ever experienced is special 💫
—
“I get really bad strep every sixteen months like clockwork. What makes you get strep every sixteen months?”

“Being alive,” Poppy says. “Getting strep is part of being alive.” 🤒

If we are always preparing to be happy, it is inevitable that we will never be so 🖤

…this disquiet I have long reckoned with as my most permanent companion: it comes from a place of wanting. And to want is a hopeful thing. It‘s the most hopeful thing, really📱

Time is everywhere, it is everything. Time is literally all there is ⏰

It is a gift in this life that we do not know what awaits us 🍂

…that there had been a last time—when they were little—that I had picked up the girls. This had often broken my heart, to realize that you never know the last time you pick up a child. Maybe you say “Oh, honey, you‘re getting too big to be picked up” or something like that. But then you never pick them up again 🥺

He grabs me, pulls me in towards him, holds me tight against him and I tell myself to remember this.

Remember how it feels. Being in here, in his arms. Remember how it feels to be folded up inside his chest, how it feels to have his arms pressed against my back, where my legs fit between his, how he ducked his chin a little so I can live under there, remember all of it because this is the last time.

⚠️⚠️⚠️

I think of the aftermath of…death and how life could feel almost normal in the pockets of time between grief, but then how the air would suddenly turn to stone around me and it felt like I might never breathe again 🌊

How much does love really matter in this economy? 🙃💕

Be where you are; otherwise you will miss your life 🩵

There is no explaining this simple truth about life: you will forget much of it. The painful things you were certain you‘d never be able to let go? Now you‘re not entirely sure when they happened, while the thrilling parts, the heart-stopping joys, splintered and scattered and became something else 🍒

Only love and understanding can conquer this disease. If you love someone, you will try to understand them. You won‘t turn away 🩶

Living in grief is this: never being alone. Invisible but evident in many ways, the presence of the dead accompanies us in the tiny interstices of the days. Over the shoulder, inside the folds of our voice, within the echo of each step. Above the windows, on the edge of the horizon, among the shadows of the trees. They are always there, and here, with and inside us, shrouding us with their warmth, protecting us from the open ❤️‍🩹

Later that night, Sylvie sat in bed with a book open in her lap. She was too sleepy to read, but the proximity of the book was comforting 📖
👭👭
She wondered if dying was simply going to be an exercise in letting go of one thing after another 🥀

Every step she took in the direction of a normal life was a step away from her lost child.
💔
What I‘m trying to say is, there may come a time when you will have to consider…accepting…
Accepting what? That it‘s too painful to go on hoping, so I should give up on him? I should cut him off to save myself the inconvenience of missing him?