Gina Bardy

“we are thirty in our hearts, before all the disappointment, all the ways it turned out to be so much more painful than we thought it would be, but then again, it has also been magic.”
― Virginia Evans, The Correspondent

“But no man with love in his life can understand how hard it is to be without it, and no happy person can truly grasp just how unhappy another might be.”
― Frode Grytten, The Ferryman and His Wife

“How cruel life is only this long. Now that I see clearly, I’d like more time.”
― Virginia Evans, The Correspondent

“There is an articulation of life one hears again and again. People will say, ‘oh, this is only a season.’ You know what I am referring to, don’t you? I mean how if someone is in difficulty they’ll say ‘it’s only a season.’ Or if someone is having a new baby and in the sleepless nights, an older woman will comfort with this idea that the expanse of time is a season—a winter, I suppose? (rather, a hurricane season!)—and the season will change eventually to something sunnier. I take issue with this. There are, by definition, four seasons that repeat in measured pattern year after year. As there is no such rhythm in the human life, I have to think that when it comes to seasons we all get one round. We are born and grow through childhood in spring. We live those glorious, lively, interesting years of our twenties, thirties, forties in summer. We settle into ourselves in autumn, that cool but not yet cold time, rich and aromatic. And in winter we age (brutally) and die. One turn of the seasons per person, unless it’s cut short, like it was for Gill, and like it was for Quintana Roo. I suppose, on this schedule, we’d say your John had made it to fall. My mother died in her summer.”
― Virginia Evans, The Correspondent