It‘s a strange thing, the way people react to grief that isn‘t their own. It‘s the monster no one wants to get too close to. It‘s too scary to think about it being their own horror-filled story…If they stay in motion, maybe they can keep the grief just far enough at bay that they won‘t absorb it and have to face any of their own 🌴💍🔨

It didn‘t occur to her then that her mother had been away from her for more than a month and that her mother had missed her every moment of every day, with the prospect of college ahead. It didn‘t occur to her that her mother‘s heart was breaking every time Kit spoke about the future. Every time she brushed aside the suggestion of time together as a family. One day it would occur to Kit. But not for many years yet 👩‍❤️‍👩

You came after me, I said
I‘ll always come after you, he said

No expectations, no disappointments.

💄🔍🫆

Every year felt like youth‘s end, until the next came along and showed you just how young you‘d been.

When you were young, you acted by instinct and a lot of those instincts were good. People always said the opposite. But the decisions of youth were unclouded by factors such as self-knowledge or cynicism or logic.

💍🍄‍🟫🍂

And finally, it took a force of nature to interrupt our routines. We just wanted to hit the reset button. We just wanted to feel flush with time to do things of no quantifiable value, our hopeful side pursuits like writing or drawing or something, something other than what we did for money. And even if we didn‘t get around to it on that day, our free day, maybe it was enough just to feel the possibility that we could if we wanted to…😷🏢

At the end of his life he only wished for what almost all of us wish for: to have our childhood summers back ☀️

How many damn books have you actually read?
Not nearly enough.
📖📚

Love finds us, passes through us, continues 🚞🗺️🌳

Our traumas, the things that injure us in this life, even over time, are not always behind us. Sometimes they linger in the smell of a newborn baby. They surprise us in the taste of a home-cooked meal. They wait in the room at the end of the hall. They are with us. They are present. And there are some days when memories feel more real than those who remain, than the joys of this world 💔

Not everyone treats family like something they‘re supposed to escape from 🎞️🪻

How many of us were rewriting ourselves, halfway through our story, when we thought we‘d already had an ending? 👙👩‍💻

No. Just no. 😑

If I had to read that someone “sniffed a laugh” or “rolled my eyes” one more time, I was going to throw the book.

I don‘t get the hype. This is my last Jessa Hastings book, they‘re just not for me.

Leave those dishes, I should have said. Come play with me in the forest, I should have said. The world will end tomorrow.

If it‘s bad news, I don‘t want to know. I want to pause here, in this moment, the moment before I know.

People will tell you that everything is clear in hindsight, but really it‘s just rewritten.

🖤🐦‍⬛🖤

Nothing lasts forever, Ali…That‘s why you should grab onto whatever makes you happy now and hold on for as long as you can 🚤

She can see the past, but it is now tinged with the excruciating inevitability of the present moment 💔

Because it feels good to love someone…It feels better than anything on this Earth. And I bet better than anything up there 🚀💫🔭

My implication, of course, was that it is the decisions that I have made in life that have placed me on my specific path — decisions, not chance 💉🚔🖤

It is really fucking sad that it should take loss to know the precise quality of love 🐋🦭🌊

Rhona has always said the dawn chorus is a way for birds to tell each other they have survived the night. Ciara has no notion if this is true or not, but she can‘t help liking the idea. The joyous flutter of song is a flag wave. I‘m still here. I made it through 🐦‍🔥

Love you, love you, love you. Nothing quiet about this love. Boisterous, shouty, exuberant love ❤️

But sometimes I think we forget that it also takes strength to be able to let go 🧵

My dad always said a person needs three things to be happy: something to do; someone to love; and something to look forward to 🐈🚗🗺️

The oddness of being in love with people who become less and less known to you each year 🧑‍🧑‍🧒‍🧒

You cannot die, because you will be missing from the photographs of all the days that haven‘t happened yet 💔

And they wonder again at what she gave to them. How she lived for them, and because of them. And in spite of everything 🤍

She is fifty-four, and she feels the whole world is moving on without her. She‘s been given a life, but she has somehow failed to spend it ⏳

There can be no greater intoxication, no purer feeling, than the moment when you meet your child after all the months of wondering and hoping and dreaming 🤱

Lives should be measured in intensity.
Remember mine
For its glory-stretch of furious light and wondrous beauty.
The world we love-lived.
🌳❤️‍🩹

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 💛