Penitence

The thing is, it’s easier to be angry than it is to be sad. Some people eventually forget the difference.

Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve done.

Forgiveness was never a goal for her to reach as part of a process; it wasn't something she had to figure out how to do and then practice, it was a gift that was given. And the gift didn't come from her at all.

Wondering what might have been is one of life’s greatest burdens,

Even if her life is falling apart, she is still this: an artist. She creates beauty; she finds beauty. She is not defined only by her failures.

The day's pressure wells up in her chest, as if the devil himself is sitting on it, breaking her sternum, forcing her to feel everything she doesn't want to feel. After Cyrus had his first heart attack, he told her the pain was like an elephant sitting on his ribs. After his second one, the one that killed him, her heart felt like it was breaking, but today she feels the pain Cyrus described. She should feel relief, because it's not a heart attack and not an elephant, but she can't, because this pain comes from the whole world, crushing her lungs with the weight of all its trage-dies. It's the stress of solving an unsolvable puzzle, of making sense of the nonsensical.

Nico, only fourteen, had recently been diagnosed with juvenile Huntington’s—even before this.