A Heart in a Body in the World

It's the people who know you and love you that save you.

Oh, every person is a book with chapters. Some are glorious and some are dark and ugly. Every person survives something.

Grief is everywhere. It's its own being. It walks beside you silently, jumps out at you meanly, pokes you awake at night. It makes tears roll down your cheeks at a blue sky.

She has decided to keep going, as anyone could tell by her closed eyes and calm expression. She realizes that all big decisions are ones that must be decided and decided again. She imagines that when you fall in love, you must decide to be in love a million times or more, and when you go to college, you must decide again and again to stay in college, and the same thing is true when you decide to run across the United States of America after a horrible tragedy. When you are a person who cares for any other person, you must decide again to care, she also understands.

Anxiety is like being in freeway traffic all the time. There's the constant sense of dodging and darting, seeking your chance to cut in, the irritation of others pulling ahead of you. You hit the accelerator, you slam the brakes. You scout and scan for danger.

She survived something big, and when you survive something big, you are always, always aware that next time you might not.

Music and books stir up emotions. They make feelings rise and clatter and wreck, and sometimes that's dangerous. But music can make you rise up and clatter and destroy when you need to, too.

Your only job—and it’s a big one—is to try to speak and live your own honest truth. That truth might shift. You might need more time to even understand what that truth is. That’s it. That’s the job. Trying to manage or control everyone else? Not the job. Impossible, besides.

The problem is, she's done things too often because she didn't what to disappoint people.

Now, whenever she thinks of it, she is confused about what she did and didn't cause. She is confused about desire, and her own desirability. She is confused about her own sexuality. It should be hers to wield as she wishes, she knows this, but why—even if she isn't wielding it, exactly, even if she's just being herself—is there the sense of a shameful invitation, or even an invitation at all? She knows she should be able to invite if she wants to invite, to say no if she wants to say no, yes if she wants to say yes, to allure or not allure, to just simply feel good about what her body is and does and how it looks. She is supposed to be sure and confident about those things, but how can she possibly be sure and confident about those things? There are so many colliding messages—confidence and shame, power and powerlessness, what she owes others and what is hers—that she can't hear what's true.

She realizes that all big decisions are ones that must be decided and decided again. She imagines that when you fall in love, you must decide to be in love a million times or more, and when you go to college, you must decide again and again to stay in college,

A human heart is the size of two hands clasped together. Imagine your own hands joined, or your hand in someone else’s, because that is what hands are for, and what hearts are for: holding each other. This can be very, very hard to remember when hearts have been so broken.

The point is that you feel uncomfortable, and you're trying to talk yourself out of it because you think you're supposed to be nice.

She doesn't bother to tell him that he should not be sorry, that he is not responsible for any of those things. She doesn't bother because they are both chronic apologizers, and chronic apologizers know that sorry is also just sorrow for the general state of the world.

This is the problem with danger, isn't it? You can even be warned and ignore the warning. Danger can seem far away until the sky grows dark, and a bolt of fury heads straight toward you.

Love is corny, when you get right down to it. It has two left feet. It trips over itself, because it is so large that it's awkward. It's sort of silly, done right. After all, how do you convey something that huge?

When you are a human being, you must decide and decide again to go forward. You must, or you won't move from the worst that life offers...

Maybe she could quit her big job of being responsible for everyone else's feelings...She imagines it—letting go. Handing the heavy stuff back to the people it belongs to.

She can't truly outrun her future, but you can't tell her body that.

You never know what a day will bring, which is both the good news and band news of life.

It's hard to be all that you can be on carrot sticks and criticism.

He's going for wisdom but the real wisdom is knowing there sometimes isn't any.

Here is what happens when your mother worries: You become secretly worried. Anxiety plays in your background like bad grocery store music. You pace and count stuff and wake at night, your heart beating too fast. You pretend to be brave, and do stuff to prove you’re not a scared person like she is.

Niceness is expected of her, not honesty.

Something has happened to her and about her, and yet it is hard to grasp this fact. Her run is larger than her, and yet her daily life is mostly just her solitary steps, the rhythm of them, her daily aches, her loneliness, and the flashes of the nightmares that she experiences daily. It seems that she's become a person with a message, but she's unclear what the message is. Maybe because the message is still fighting its way through the grief and guilt to get to her.