Pearl E’s Reviews > The Wedding People > Status Update

She didn't understand that this is what happens as you get older- that the same thing that repulsed her when she was young is the exact same thing that draws her near now.

Until it is gone, of course... What do you do? Do you start all over again? Do you fixate on the new thing that you are sure is going to make you happy'? How many times does a person do this over a lifetime? Is that just what life is?

She worries it's her fault and that by giving Lila everything, they have given her nothing. They have stripped her of the most important thing: actual human desire. Her life has no urgency. There are no stakes.

And maybe they are all lonely. Maybe this is just what it means to be a person. To constantly reckon with being a single being in one body.

I need you to tell me that you love me more often right now, she should have said.

But Phoebe hesitates. The old Phoebe never made the first move. Not even with her husband after years of marriage-she always waited for him to initiate. She was always too embarrassed to admit that she ever wanted anything, as if there was something humiliating about being a person with desires. But what would it feel like to be different? To be totally honest about what she wants?

But this is how it happens, she realizes. One moment of pretending to be great leads to the next moment of pretending to be great, and ten years later, she realizes she's spent her entire life just pretending to be great.

There is no so thing as a happy place. Because when you're happy, everywhere is a happy place.

“I think we talk about happiness all wrong. As if it's this fixed state ere ping to reach. Like we'll just be able to live there, forever. But that's not my experience with happiness. For me, it comes and goes. It mows up and then disappears like a bubble."

I agree," she says. "How are we not supposed to talk about the slow decay of our bodies?"
"T's truly the most dramatic thing that will ever happen to us, he
says.
"It's basically like being on a sinking ship. Except you're never aloved to acknowledge that the ship is sinking"
"And then people roll their eyes every time you mention that the ship might be sinking," Phoebe says.