Ellen Sears

“Airports and train stations are where you get to cry”
― Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“Staying is not always a choice, and I have lived and lost enough to know that. But the way I think about grief is that it is the great tug-of-war, and sometimes the flag is on the side you don’t want it to be on. And sometimes, the game has exhausted all of its joy, and all that’s left is you on your knees. But, today, even though I am sad, my hands are still on the rope.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

“I have never been one of those people—I know you aren’t, either—who feels that the love one has for a child is somehow a superior love, one more meaningful, more significant, and grander than any other. I didn’t feel that before Jacob, and I didn’t feel that after. But it is a singular love, because it is a love whose foundation is not physical attraction, or pleasure, or intellect, but fear. You have never known fear until you have a child, and maybe that is what tricks us into thinking that it is more magnificent, because the fear itself is more magnificent. Every day, your first thought is not “I love him” but “How is he?” The world, overnight, rearranges itself into an obstacle course of terrors. I would hold him in my arms and wait to cross the street and would think how absurd it was that my child, that any child, could expect to survive this life. It seemed as improbable as the survival of one of those late-spring butterflies—you know, those little white ones—I sometimes saw wobbling through the air, always just millimeters away from smacking itself against a windshield.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“He is at the end of their driveway, where the dirt road meets the asphalt, and seeing Hemming, he is overcome with longing. 'Hemming!' he shouts, and then, nonsensically, 'Wait for me!' And he beings to run toward his brother, so fast that after a while, he can't even feel his feet trike the ground beneath him.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life