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.

🧵🚬🍺

…every healer is a wounded person first 💔

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 🌱

There is nothing that cannot fall apart 🖤

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 🛋📺🍜

That‘s the trouble with pain. It‘s as contagious as a disease. It spreads from the person who first endured it to those who love them most 💔

There is good and there is evil, and the contradiction lives in everyone. The good is simply the stuff worth remembering. The good is the point of it all 😈😇

Sadness made for a better houseguest; at least it was quiet, reliable, consistent 🫗

Hal said we begin at the end.
So where are we now?
I‘m not sure it matters.
Wherever it is, I hope we can stay here a little longer.
🪦🐎🖤

You cannot trust perception. Falling, at first, feels like flying 🦋
—
Just then, the sun breaks over the tree line, setting the trees aflame. It is the kind of art that no master could ever capture on canvas, but it‘s here for the viewing every single day 🌅

…some stories had a way of getting stuck inside our heads. Usually, because we were afraid of what those stories revealed about us—our fears and our inadequacies, our mistakes and our failures. Sometimes, those stories needed a little nudging to come out 🕶

She felt something she had assumed she would never feel again: the thrill of a new beginning 👀

The funny thing about a picture is that while it knows everything that‘s happened up until the moment it‘s been taken, it knows absotively nothing about what happens next. And yet, once the picture has been framed and hung on the wall, what you see when you look closely are all the things that were about to happen. All the un-things. The things that were unanticipated. And unintended. And unreversible 🖼

The library. Books held the answer to every question.

Books had always been her solace; novels gave her space to be bold, brave, beautiful, if only in her own imagination.

📖📚📖📚

Water flows from high places to low places. That is the nature of gravity. Emotions also seem to act according to gravity. When in the presence of someone with whom you have a bond, and to whom you have entrusted your feelings, it is hard to lie and get away with it. The truth just wants to come flowing out 🪑☕️

Don‘t take things so serious. Learn to make and take a joke, ‘cause if you don‘t, it‘s going to be an awful dreary life for you 👭
.
Tomorrow—next month—next year. Everything was always going to be better in the future. And suddenly the future had come. It was a brief present. Too soon it would merge into a past to be remembered ⏳

Now I only dream about your father sometimes, instead of every night. And I dream about you even less. I cringe to write that, but it‘s true. I didn‘t think I‘d feel guilty for healing. But I guess, in some ways, I do 🎹💭

It‘s easy to fall in love with someone when you need them, but that doesn‘t make it real or right. I don‘t think how we were in our time together is how we‘d always be. There‘s a way you hold yourself in when love and need get tangled. It‘s hard to know what would last and what would wear too thin to keep 🛣🎶👶

I don‘t know how other people do it, not stay with the girl whose ankle socks made your stomach flip at age fourteen, whose wet hair smells like your past—the girl who was with you the very moment you were introduced to happiness 👩‍❤️‍👨
•
Adults hid their pain, their fears, their failure, but adolescents hid their happiness, as if to reveal it would risk its loss 🌚