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?

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 🔪