The First Time She Drowned

It was when I discovered that there are two kinds of death. There is ceasing to exist, usually accompanied by a funeral and loved ones in mourning. And then there is emotional death born out of necessity and measured solely by the absence of grief it causes: the turning off the lights of oneself in order to shut down the feelings of being alive.

That's the weirdest thing about being cut off from life. Everything gets washed out or muted or recedes into the background except for other people's laughter. Other people's laughter gets very loud and jarring. It penetrates. It is a reminder that other people live.

Part of being healthy is being able to hold and remember who people actually are instead of who we wish they were. It's a daily struggle against a brain that tends to want to cling to fairy-tale hope, but it's also the only way to guarantee a life surrounded by those who build rather than destroy. In the end, the loss is about letting go of what I never had in the first place.

Suddenly I don't even care that I fell, because of that brief moment when I stood, and I wonder if this is what other people seem to have that I do not--this courage to fall because they have memory of standing.

Because just like all the other times I've drowned in my life, I'm determined to keep paddling forward, to believe that none of it has affected me at all.

I have seen this happen before, how one act of parental kindness across a history of cruelty can make a kid in here forgive everything that came before simply because they have been deprived of kindness for so long.

who insisted every day that I see my own worth beyond my mother’s rejecting eyes. But of course, a mother’s eyes are the very first mirror we look into, the image that gets imprinted on our souls—whether they gaze back at us with love or with disgust. So I don’t know how to differentiate between her perceptions of me and my own when hers were the first I’ve ever known, so deeply ingrained from the second I hit the world.

Wondering whether it's worse to be with other people and have nowhere to hide or to be so alone that no one can find you.

His words are like seawater to the shipwrecked: I'm tempted to drink them in, and at the same time, they feel dangerously deceptive.

They say the farther away you are from the beach, the louder it sounds. That way it's always with you and you can always find your way back.

The only people who have room to worry about the future are those who aren't fighting just to survive the present.

It is a bone calm, a soul calm, as if the unnamable but constant rattle inside me has been silenced for a moment, given a source to express and extinguish itself, I think back to that saving voice in my head and I wonder how I can find her again - the me who is wise and unafraid, who believes I will be okay.

The sun is ours. The Atlantic breaks. And we ride it, we ride it, we ride it.

The known universe always feels easier even when it's miserable.

I've always had this vision of how my life would end. I wonder if everybody has an idea of their worst imaginable death, an image so explicit you could almost wonder if is is prophetic.

And then there is emotional death born out of necessity and measured solely by the absence of grief it causes: the turning off the lights of oneself in order to shut down the feelings of being alive. Eventually I just checked out of the world altogether, leaving behind only my body, like a snail abandoning its shell. Sometimes I would catch myself in the mirror, surprised to see someone staring back at me, a stranger whose face I struggled to connect as my own, whose body was visible and intact despite the feeling that I moved through the world as a ghost.

Most of the kids here talk constantly about the glorious day when they will finally be reunited with their families, never mind the fact that it was their screwed-up parents who messed them up and then dumped them here. That's another fact of life - it's really hard not to love your parents, even when they suck.

I had made the mistake of telling the truth, and the truth was the enemy.

prologue MY MOTHER WORE the sun like a hat. It followed her as we did, stopping when she stopped, moving when she moved. She carried her beauty with the naiveté of someone who was born to it and thus never understood its value or the poverty of ugliness. As

I am learning through my work with Liz that part of being healthy is being able to hold and remember who people actually are instead of who we wish they were. It's a daily struggle against a brain that tends to want to cling to a fairy-tale hope, but it's also the only way to guarantee a life surrounded by those who build rather than destroy. In the end, the loss is about letting go of what I never had in the first place.

There is no one around in any direction as far as I can see, and there is so much peace in that , in the absence of human voices. Sometimes is seems like everybody wants to put their noise into the world until you can't have enough quiet to even know you exist.

I stepped inside. It smelled like cleaning fluid and salt: sanitized tears. Not mine, I thought. “You

But the thing is, when you don't have a mother, you don't have a home, and when you don't have a home, there's no where to go when you're sad or scared or alone, even in your own mind, there's just no where to go.

Try to remember to breathe, to see that the sun is out, that the picture is bigger than this moment, that life moves, changes constantly, like the ocean.

The world is strange, or I feel strange in it - full of hope and sorrow, both at once.

And I had to do something. I had to fix the thing in my mother’s face that looked broken. The thing I felt that I had broken. The solution was obvious to me. I turned and headed for the pool.

Already I was learning to want only what my mother wanted, to want it with life-preserving desperation. “Let’s go somewhere fun!