Olivia Bernard’s Reviews > Just Last Night > Status Update

‘This is how it feels in the split second you suddenly become aware that you’re falling in love with someone. The click of a jigsaw’s last piece, the rainfall of coins in a jackpot slot machine, the right song striking up and your being swept away by its opening bars. That conviction of making complete sense of the universe, in one moment. Of course. You’re where I should be. You’re here.’

‘Ed is not in pursuit of me, by any measure, nor vice versa. Yet he’s always there. We’re forever romantically adjacent. But how do you emotionally detach when they’re one of your best mates?’

someone shot me 😩

‘Each time, the whiplash of remembering, like the spike of nausea you get coming to a very sudden halt aboard a moving object. Then the abyss of “no Susie ever again” opens up beyond it. It doesn’t change, this being gone. Who knew that the most obvious thing about it is the hardest part?’

‘There’s shock and then there’s grief, and there’s the simple tiring unending chore of life afterward. These are all different things, I’ve learned.’

‘I think the truth is: opportunities in life are like doors flashing open and slamming closed, for good. You won’t necessarily notice when they’re open or get any warning they’re going to close. If you don’t bolt through them when you can, then that is that.’

‘Someone once said to me birth was the most ordinary and extraordinary thing you’ll ever experience, simultaneously, and death is the same. The fact of yours sits there, implacably, being so banal and so mind-blowingly strange at the same time. It will always be like this, I have come to realize. The ache is permanent, it must be accommodated. It’s part of my body now.’