- Nothing prepared me for the moment when she went quiet, when she was confined to her bed and trapped in her body. When all she could do was look at me and all I could do was look away. (15)
- I watch as the water settles and think of how quickly the disturbance is forgotten, how quickly the ripples become the whole. For a moment I imagine filling my pockets with stones and sand and walking into the water -- until I too am part of the whole. (66)
- The white coats took more of his life than they gave back. They were supposed to make him better, make him stop remembering, but they didn't. ... Somehow I knew he was never coming home. (74)
- 'The world is wherever you find yourself, ... And here, it is. Now.' ... He catches her fleeting glance, then leans in and brushes his lips against hers. The moment is brief, but inside that moment is an entire world governed by the sound of her own pulse, of his collapsing breath on her neck. ... 'And if you should go, where will I be but lost in this place that once was my home?' (99)
- They don't know that these lines, these letters, promises delivered, would soon be all they have left of each other. (125)
- He flashes me a smile, a thunderbolt to my heart. Always on target. (137)
- I realize then that in life there is no letting go. (141)
- I remembered when I stopped feeling the in-utero movements, the panic on the way to the hospital, the crushing blow of having to deliver this child, the shock of seeing its lifeless premature body. I had carried it for thirty-two weeks, felt its being flutter through mine, absorbed its cells, and yet it never existed. There is no record of it, except the one that is written on my body. Five months later its grave became a womb again. I worried about the new baby. Did Sharon inherit that trauma, did she absorb sadness as if it were nourishment? What is passed from mother to child? (149)
- I strain to make out the words, recognizing only the rhythm of his saying my name. It was this that I loved. The way he said my name was always a surrendering of sorts -- an exhale. (161)
- But I've thought about him every day, even when I've tried not to. I've recognized him in day-to-day details, in quiet moments and faraway looks, in the faces of strangers. Whenever the seasons changed and natural wonder and drama filled the skies I've wondered what he's thinking. And yet I couldn't possibly know. ... I remember him one way when surely he is now an entirely different way. This is what happens. The past is always changed by the present. There is no true account, not even the number of years that have gone by. it's what the years hide, reveal, and keep secret, what they tuck into days and minutes, what they fold and slip into dreams and nightmares -- that is where the real living is. (189-190)
- There is a single red geranium on the ledge and the colour, the purpose, the contrast surprises me. He does not turn when I call his name. His hair, curly and unkempt, grazes his shoulders and I suddenly remember his boyhood. He is running, thick-grinned, away from the setting sun into Mother's arms. She whispers something in his ear and musses his curls and he stares at me with his surprising grey eyes that are as round as riverbed stones. I know I've witnessed small mysteries. They come back to me now as hope. ... I see his reflection in the dirty window and am struck with his raw beauty. I've never known a man to look beautiful; the sight of my brother grown up into this lovely stranger moves me. ... I can tell by his eyes that he too is calculating the years lost. (191)
- 'And what is God other than an answer or a reason in the dark?' (234)
- It's an unspoken dialect: the tilt of the head, the watching of light and shadow in a room, the long silences, the pauses, the searching for something. The need for quiet perfection in how we circle such a finiteness that only reminds us of how poor we are at endings. How we cannot fathom conclusions in our lives. Endings are for stories and television; they are for others. Not for me and not for her. (237)
- No one talks about it, no one gives it a name or a shape, and so I talk around it, circle it, catalogue its parts, its symptoms and signs. I know it's coming but I don't know what that will mean after it arrives, or after it occurs. I don't even know if death is or if death does. Is it a noun or a verb or both? But soon I will learn that death is like a murder of crows. It darkens the sky and weighs it down. It fills my ears with a shrill cawing, a pulse and thrumming of wings, and it pushes and pulls me along the edge of the sky, leaving me teetering on the brink of this life and the next. And then, months later, when the business of dying is over and all that must be read, divided, sold, and settled is done, it leaves me in the silence and emptiness of something never being over. (238)
- I pause. I want to tell him that grief is like living in a burned-out building or a bombed city. It's like living in the aftermath of some violent end -- all rubble and ruins, your body covered in chalky film, the feeling of never being clean and good. (245)
- And when we were young / Love was a burning map of / Forgetting ourselves. (247)
dec 15 2021 ∞
jan 4 2022 +