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 🥀
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?
The problem with this is that it can‘t go on forever; books end 📚🔥
Maybe there‘s no such thing as soulmates. Maybe there are only people who trust each other enough to begin something without being assured of the end 🫶
Infinite waves. Infinite chances. You can‘t dwell or think about what might have been. There‘s always another wave. Although you have to be looking the right way to see it 🌊
Life hurts. It‘s full of heartache, loss, and disappointment, and even the best things come salted with sorrow. But you can‘t leave yourself open to the good things—happiness, true love, real connection—if you aren‘t willing to risk being hurt 🚲🛣️
I had predicated my life on the idea that I wanted to see everywhere extraordinary, but I‘d come to realize that extraordinary was everywhere 💫
The problem with genuine memories is that you know too much. It ruins everything 📚🍷🇮🇪
Writing is the closest thing we have to real magic. Writing is creating something out of nothing, is opening doors to other lands. Writing gives you power to shape your own world when the real one hurts too much ✍🏻📓
He wished he‘d been able to know all the last times so he could have enjoyed them, taken in every detail, every molecule of each moment ⏳
My favorite 2023 reads! 📚
I read a total of 30 books this year. This is the fifth year in a row that I haven‘t met my reading goal, but that‘s okay. I still enjoy reading, which is the most important thing, and it‘s my favorite past time. My almost 2-year-old seems to enjoy books and reading just as much as me, which makes my heart so happy ❤️
But I have feeling 2024 is my year, and I might just meet my goal again!
We always think we‘ll see death coming and that we‘ll have more time, until we‘re reminded otherwise 😢
—
It‘s an ordinary week within the most extraordinary circumstances because apparently—and this is what everyone fails to mention about the grieving process—I still have to live 🌱
Time does not heal all wounds. Grief is just like a sink full of dirty dishes or a pile of soiled laundry. Grief is a chore you have to do, and it‘s a messy one, at that 💔
The falls were a tame trickle and the pool itself a deep, easy blue. Taking art classes on repeat, you learn a lot about color, but I can‘t explain that blue. My eye kept going back to the turquoise middle. You so rarely see that, but children will color water that way every time, given the right choice of crayons. Like they were born knowing there‘s better out there than what we‘re getting 🩵
Our relationship wasn‘t traditional. We were best friends, and sometimes we were…partners. I always wanted more than Maggie could give, but I figure I‘m lucky I got as much of her as I did 🌅
Doubt and truth are so close that it‘s sometimes impossible to tell them apart 🍷
Our brains are hardwired to want resolution, to want the answer 🧠
Optimism is like ice cream: as much as I try to remind myself it‘s bad for me and I should stay away, I‘m human, can‘t help a tiny taste, and the next thing you know, I‘m digging into the whole carton, gulping it down, and it always ends with me feeling sick and wanting to throw up 🍦
The world is full of lasts, she thinks…And with all these moments you don‘t know that this will be the last or you would be overwhelmed by the poignancy of them, hang on to them like someone unhinged, bury your face in them, never let them go 👠
Everyone was on the same ticking clock. They might fool themselves into thinking that more time affords them opportunities to do more things, that the future is open-ended. But the world is simply too big. We weren‘t meant to see everything, we weren‘t built to do everything, we aren‘t capable of knowing everything. At a certain point, peace has to be found with the choices we‘ve made ⏳
She is his mother, she keeps telling herself. She would do anything to protect him. She has come to realize that the ferocity of this kind of love is enough to drive you mad, that the tragic flaw of parenthood is that you equip your child to leave you. But what if you never want to let them go? 🧸🩵
There is more than one way to play the game. And there is more than one way to win it 🔪
Like, no one ever actually knows what the right thing to do is. I mean, you can think that you know what‘s right, and you can tell yourself that you know, but at the point that you make your choice, like, in the moment, you‘re never really certain. You just hope. 🌱🍄🌲
Because how could anyone deserve you, let alone me? But I‘m also really grateful because I always wanted to feel disbelief at my own luck 📺🌃
She‘d heard enough regrets in her lifetime to know that dreams don‘t always die because of something terrible, but more often because of something that‘s merely acceptable 🍽️🛶💛
Well I have a lot of experience with nice people…and it‘s always the nice ones that have something to hide 👀
Will you stick with it? he said.
Yeah. I hate not finishing a book.
That‘s a good policy. Although sometimes I think life‘s too short.
📚🥃🚬
If one only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are 🏃🏽♀️💬
…no matter what happens, and I‘ve seen some things happen to some people, no one that I know has ever regretted starting a family ❤️
Picturing her little house made her realize her homesickness. It struck her that this was good, this idea that she would be happy to get back to her life…Maybe it wasn‘t self-protection or self-sabotage; maybe it wasn‘t that she was afraid of change. Maybe she had just built a life she liked 🫶
Lake Placid Public Library 🛶
…so I should always remember that I must never let sentiment get in the way of necessary action ♟️
I don‘t know if that‘s love, to need the sensations produced by the body more than the body itself. Not the kiss, but the taste of celery that came after. Not his hands, but the sound of his hands making art. Not the fact that he was here for only this summer, but the fact that I might find reminders of him in surprising places for the rest of my life 🩶
My older self knows that you must stop—in the middle of the chaos—to take in the world around you 🎾🏆
It was dark in the garden, just before dawn, when the air is grey and the nightbirds are singing. They were tired, those nightbirds, and their song was quieter now. But they were still singing, and they went on singing until dawn broke over the trees 🐦⬛🔪
And yet: reacting feels involuntary. As long as we‘re both breathing, we‘ll probably forever misread each other‘s faces; second-guess and misinterpret each other‘s thoughts, feelings, and motives in the worst possible way 👭
Will you miss nothing about the town when you‘re gone?
She wasn‘t going to admit that she was scared she‘d miss everything and terrified she‘d miss nothing.
🧵🚬🍺
But there was always a negative space, a shadow on the sand. That is the way with loss: you can‘t undo it, no matter what you have gained 🖤
…but that‘s the thing with memory: it makes up its own stories. They harden and calcify in just the same way as facts, and most of the time we have no idea which is which 🦀🐚🌾
She remembered being happy. Right? She hoped she had been happy. What she didn‘t know was if she had been happy since. But nobody‘s happy all the time. It‘s no way to go through life. If you‘re happy all the time, you don‘t appreciate anything. You have to have contrast, to have low moments to bring out the high moments in relief 🦞
Before long, he caught a hold of himself and concluded that nothing ever did happen again; to each was given days and chances which wouldn‘t come back around. And wasn‘t it sweet to be where you were and let it remind you of the past for once, despite the upset, instead of always looking on into the mechanics of the days and the trouble ahead, which might never come 🌨️
There is a space, I think, between understanding that we are all alone—unknowable—and acknowledging this lonely truth. Some of us live forever in this space. I certainly tried 🛟
His eyes are the clear blue skies they always were, but so much else is different. The edges of his cheekbones and jaw are harder…His hair is shorter than he used to wear it…his arms are thick and corded. He was beautiful at eighteen, but adult Sam is so devastating I could cry. I missed him becoming this. And the grief of that loss—of seeing Sam grow into a man—is a fist squeezing around my lungs 🛶
It was all going to be fine. Or maybe it wasn‘t. Either way, I would survive 💍📷✨
My favorite 2022 reads! 📚
I read a total of 29 books this year, my lowest total that I can remember in a long time but I have the best excuse — I became a mother to a baby girl in March. She keeps us happily occupied most days, but I try to find time to read when I can (during naps, before bed, lobby waiting, road trips, etc.).
My 2023 reading goal is to make the most of the quiet moments ✨
Being a parent is a lot like having a dream. Some of it isn‘t very nice. Most of it, even when it‘s ugly, is beautiful 👶🏻❤️
I will say that one of the most useful developments in my personality…has been a generalized giving of way fewer fucks, especially about what I look like; a stubborn, feral sense of being too focused on keeping a little totally dependent person alive allows me to mostly disengage from concerns about my own appearance 🪞
Having a baby, Elizabeth realized, was a little like living with a visitor from a distant planet. There was a certain amount of give and take as the visitor learned your ways and you learned theirs, but gradually their ways faded and your ways stuck. Which she found regrettable. Because unlike adults, her visitor never tired of even the smallest discovery; always saw magic in the ordinary 🧪🔬✨
When does a person actually choose anything? Once every so often—at the very most—I think someone actually chooses something. Otherwise we‘re following something—we don‘t even know what it is but we follow it 🌱
Maybe that was the trick to life: to notice all the tiny moments in the day when everything else fell away and, for a split second, or maybe even a few seconds, you had no worries, only pleasure, only appreciation of what was right in front of you 🧡
She made a wish because she was lucky enough to wish for things and think they might come true ✨
You may at times—dusk, Sunday evening, the middle of winter—find yourself suddenly overwhelmed by an intense physical desire to go home. All you want to do, you tell yourself, is sit down in front of the TV with your husband on the ugly brown couch and eat cold lo mein noodles one last time. And that would be enough. Just one ordinary day 🛋📺🍜