Melanie > Recent Status Updates

I hope literally anything happens soon

“So when I get too soft, too comforted, too close to love, the Ache reminds me. It always arrives in words (she’ll die) or an image (a phone call, a funeral), and immediately, my body responds. I stiffen, hold my breath, straighten my spine, break eye contact, lean away. After that, I’m in control again. The Ache keeps me prepared, distant, safe. The Ache keeps me fine, which is another word for half dead.”

“He had lost her, had lost her one final time, not to the crowd, but to a man who appreciated her fully, badly, boldly, a man who knew her blemishes and thought then beauty marks…intimacy was not about maintaining the idealistic charade of courtship; it was about embracing and adoring the flaws.”

So we say, “Maybe it’s safer to just stay here. Even if it’s not true enough, maybe it’s good enough.” But good enough is what makes people drink too much and snark too much and become bitter and sick and live in quiet desperation until they lie on their deathbed and wonder: What kind of life/relationship/family/world might I have created if I’d been braver?”

“Then she spent the next decade trying not to know what she knew: that she had betrayed herself and that her life would not really begin until she stopped betraying herself.”

“‘Maybe in a different life.’ Isn’t that interesting? As if I had more than one.”