Emily M-H > Recent Status Updates

The artist's bookcases were full of poets, like the bookcases of anyone trying to find out how everyone else copes.

Angry at himself, angry at the artist, and most of all angry at death for having such good taste. Always taking the best first.

Children have two worlds, the one they have been given and the one they can dream about, but not even the artist had enough imagination to believe it was possible to paint his way out of there. It would take a really, really big idiot to dream anything as grand as that.
Thank goodness he had one of those.

It was Joar, also five years old, who had thrown open the lid of the trunk while the other kids ran to the teachers crying because their noses and lips were bleeding. That was Joar's first day at preschool, and the last day of loneliness for the boy in the trunk. You do whatever you can to not disappoint a friend after that.

Art is so big, so unfathomable, that it teaches us to mourn for strangers.

The cat? Obviously it runs off when the police arrive. Cats may not know much about prison, but this one knows enough, it's an outdoor cat and has no intention of becoming a locked-up cat. Besides, it knows that people will like the man more when they find out he's a world-famous artist, but they'll like the cat less when they find out it isn't homeless.

The artist? He was good at seeing the beauty in everything, that happens if you're no good at seeing it in yourself. He didn't belong in school, he didn't belong in this town, he didn't belong in his own body.
He had cried so much that spring when he was fourteen that he felt hollow.

He runs after her, but of course he doesn't stand a chance, he's a grown man and they don't have a clue about how to run. Grown men don't have enough things they're afraid of on this planet to become good at running.

the building where the auction is being held is an old church. We know that because all the rich people at the auction keep saying to each other: "Did you know this is an old church?" Because rich people love reminding each other about how incredibly rich they are, so rich that they can buy things from God.

They save everyone they can. And then the mum and dad wombats stick their bums up into the entrances of the burrows to block the fire and the ash from coming down. And their bums get burned, and sometimes they die, but they protect the others.

Wombats have a thing they do in fires. They take their families underground, into their burrows. They have tunnels under the earth, and they go down there to take shelter, but they don't just take their families, they also take other animals down there.

Time passes and Fen enjoys these fantasies. They give her something to do. She would be bored without them. Never, in any of her wildest imaginings, does she think anything will happen between them. And, if she is honest with herself, never has she wanted anything to happen. The fun of the crush is that it exists in her mind. That it is her secret. And that she is safe from it.

I don't tell him it's not his job to carry his family. It is his job, because he has decided it is. I understand this maybe better than anyone. I think of the things I decided to carry, and how I had to make myself strong enough to do so, and then I think of my mum again. She was very loving in the beginning, but grief severs things.

"As we do this part," I say, "we put all our gratitude into it. We put every good feeling into the metal, and we think about the creatures on this island and how much their lives matter." They move forward, eager in a way I wasn't expecting, and I'm glad for the long bright evenings because soon we have built something new.

I thought he understood me. I thought he accepted the vulnerability I battled to show him, I thought we were closer for it, but instead of comprehending the complexity of how I felt-and the difficulty of contradictory feelings-he judged me, misunderstood me, and is now using it against me.

I stare at him. In the years we have been together it has become very clear to me that he does not see me at all. I am actually not so bothered by this; what an ordeal it would be, to be known.

I have made my love for him weak, designed it to be so, that it should be easier to cut myself free of.

"I'm fine," I repeat, meeting her eyes. She is scared. I see this fear in her face whenever she looks at me: she has never known me like this. To Liv I have always been rock solid, the most reliable thing she has ever known. I made myself this way, for her and for our sister Jay. I had to carry them. And now I am unraveled and she's frightened and I don't know how to tie my pieces back together.

But the dandelion-this single flower that has given nourishment to countless other living creatures-is considered a weed.

This was once a mountain that stood nearly 12,000 feet tall and then had its heart removed.

But hard as I tried, I couldn't see them in my mind's eye. Not the mountain or the wasteland or the empty bowl. They simply were not there anymore.
There was only the stillness and silence of that water: what a mountain and a wasteland and an empty bowl turned into after the healing began.

The Klamath tribe still considered the lake a sacred site and I could see why. I wasn't a skeptic about this. It didn't matter that all around me there were tourists taking pictures and driving slowly past in their cars. I could feel the lake's power.

It had been an indisputably good time, but now I felt empty.
Like there was something I didn't even know I wanted until I didn't get it.

What if I forgave myself? I thought. What if I forgave myself even though I'd done something I shouldn't have?

What if I was sorry, but if I could go back in time I wouldn't do anything differently than I had done?

It had only to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles for no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental.

It was the thing that had compelled them to fight for the trail against all the odds, and it was the thing that drove me and every other long-distance hiker onward on the most miserable days. It had nothing to do with gear or footwear or the backpacking fads or philosophies of any particular era or even with getting from point A to point B.

the realization of what that story meant picked up force and hit me squarely in the chest: preposterous as it was, when Catherine Montgomery and Clinton Clarke and Warren Rogers and the hundreds of others who'd created the PCT had imagined the people who would walk that high trail that wound down the heights of our western mountains, they'd been imagining me.

I didn't feel like a big fat idiot anymore. And I didn't feel like a hard-ass motherfucking Amazonian queen. I felt fierce and humble and gathered up inside, like I was safe in this world too.

I cried and I cried and I cried. I wasn't crying because I was happy. I wasn't crying because I was sad. I wasn't crying because of my mother or my father or Paul. I was crying because I was full. Of those fifty-some hard days on the trail and of the 9,760 days that had come before them too.