When someone you love has died, there is a certain grace period during which you can get away with murder. Not literal murder, but pretty much anything else.
Do you need anything?” she asks. A mom A dad. Someone. Anyone. Can you arrange for that? “Nah, I’m good.
Get away from my house and all its rooms that echo, all the rooms I don’t enter anymore.
Why she was the happy one when she was dying, and I just can’t seem to manage anything when I’m living.
Because I’m living, and I sure as hell don’t have a clue how to feel anything but empty.
Another deserted sentence. Another side effect of death. Words go AWOL.
My mom was there to answer the unanswerable, to make sense of the fault in our life – and we got through that somehow; we came out on the other side. Now I’m 0 for 2 and I don’t get any more pitches to swing at.
No, I am not all right, I want to say. Have you been to my house? Have you seen how empty it is?
Sometimes, when we are sad, we have to do the opposite of sad. Sometimes we have to sing.
You’re not the same. You’re not supposed to be the same. You’re supposed to be different. This isn’t something you will ever forget.
We are what we love. We are the things, the people, the ideas we spend our days with. They center us, they drive us, they define us to our very core.Without them, we are empty.
I don’t need to be any place else, because the music takes me to the only place I want to be right now. To the place where I am and have always been wholly me, the only church I’ve ever belonged to, the only place I’ve ever prayed.
Because maybe it’s in the stories that the people we love are still alive.
Because this is what I believe – that second chances are stronger than secrets. You can let secrets go. But a second chance? You don’t let that pass you by.
But I am tired of everyone being gone, and I am tired of everything that has tired me out for the last five years of my life.
But I don’t feel like dealing because dealing requires too much energy, and energy is what I lack.
[Referring to rape] It already is bigger than everything else. It lives in front of me, behind me, next to me, inside me every single day. My schedule is dictated by it, my habits by it, my music by it.
Why am I doing this? Because it feels so good to talk like we used to, even though I know this is just a shadow of what we had. But I chase it anyway.