Gwen Williams’s Reviews > Joyride: A Memoir > Status Update

All I yearn for was some confirmation that those memories existed and I mattered, because otherwise they were a broken circuit within me as if I had the lock, but not the key closure wasn’t really what I wanted: I knew there would never be a tallying of accounts or an attempt to find the sum of our life together.

That lesson from the tall mood about each person containing the universe and how, when that person is gone, their individual universe stop spinning. It was the one argument with existence that you could never win.

Those memories were now scorched, indecipherable, as foreign as a language I once spoke fluently, but no longer understood. After we signed our divorce agreement, I never saw Peter again for the rest of his life.

Every betrayal is unique, but they all have a pattern, a wave form, a surging a crashing that sucks you below the waterline and then pitches you, breathless and wet with tears onto the sand. Some people find their footing and dash away before the next wave reaches them.

I thought believing was what you did when you loved someone

As included in the “instructions for living a life “set out by poet Mary Oliver, pay attention, be astonished, tell about it.

Everyone benefits from stepping back, and consider considering what and why they do the things they do, whatever it is that they do.
We were a canoe, balancing on a hair, but I persuaded myself we were on solid ground.

We write to express the worrying in our heads, the thousand thoughts, and impressions that are private, internal, invisible, until they spill out into being, made present through language. Talking does that, and writing does it, in a more permanent way.

Being a writer requires having the confidence to think you have something to say, but it almost always linked with the neediness of wanting the audience to hear and approve it. That makes can be brutal.

At worst, I would’ve been turned down, but besides disappointment and light bruising to my ego, it wouldn’t have been so bad. What would’ve been terrible was not making the effort to see if maybe it was meant to be.