The Fortunes of Indigo Skye

The loneliness you feel with another person, the wrong person, is the loneliest of all.

Maybe a person's world can grow bigger in all the right ways, not too wide that it becomes shallow, just large enough to preserve its depth.

I'll tell you one thing about me, and that is that I'm not to keen on being bossed around. If, say, my Mom tells me to empty the dishwasher, I like to wait a little bit, you know, not hop up and do it right away, because then it feels more like my own idea. That's a little problematic when you have an actual boss.

I don't get why prom is like a mini-wedding these days...No one should spend that kind of money for a high school dance.

This is just one of those annoying and unjust differences between you and your younger sibling...I was probably fifteen before I could go to a friend's house without giving mom an FBI dossier on the people; Bex can practically hitchhike on the freeway with a mere "Have fun, honey.

In the middle of the night I am awakened by a sound. I sit up abruptly in bed. I hear it again. It's music. Wait, it sounds like the ice cream man, in our house. Is this some kind of twisted nightmare? The flipping ice cream man, breaking in to chop us all up in our beds to the tune of 'Zippity Do Dah'?... My heart slows. I remember. There is no psycho ice cream man here. It is just our new musical soap dispenser...

I didn't know what I wanted to Be...A sense that I had permanently botched things already, embarked on the trip without the map. and it scared me too, that I might end up as a mother of 3 working in a psychiatrist's office, or renting surfboards...I guess I saw their lives as failed somehow, absent of the Big Win...What is fate was an inherited trait? What if luck came through the genetic line, and the ability to "succeed" at your chosen "direction" was handed down, just like the family china? Maybe I was destined to be a weed too.

I put the guitar back in the case. I can't even look at it anymore. Instead, I want to make brownies. I want an end result there's a recipe for. I want to combine eggs and water and oil and chocolate and flour and sugar and vanilla and get something fulfilling.

This is not just a simple story of "money can't buy happiness." Or maybe that's just what it is. And if it is, why shouldn't it be? Because if this is something we are already supposed to know, then why don't we know it? Why do we chase and scrabble and fight for things to flaunt, why? Why do we reach for power over other people, and through the thin superiority of our possessions, believe we have it? Why do we let money make people bigger, and allow those without it to be made smaller? How did we lose the truth in the frantic, tribal drumbeat of more, more, more?

So I forcibly shove aside my prickles of pissed-off, which is easier than it sounds when millions of little sequined caffeine dancers are doing their big Broadway number on your internal stage. (Page 173)

Hundreds,' Joe says. 'Hundreds and hundreds. But then again, I'm old.' So old, Jesus was in your math class,' I say. I crack myself up.

Yeah. When you want what's real and you try to find that in high school, you might as well be looking for a mossy rock beside a babbling brook on the corner of Sixth and Pine in downtown Seattle.

You wouldn't match Melanie and me up, and if we hadn't gotten stuck together as lab partners in junior high science, I doubt if we'd have matched us up either. I'm not sure why we even stuck, except that we each probably find the other to be entertaining...Besides I feel like it was a personal mission of mine to broaden Melanie's world, though I think she felt the same for me.

Here, kitty, kitty, Chico says. The cover of his cage is still on, making his tiny clown voice slightly muffled. I feel bad for him under there, just waiting to start his evil little day...Freud walks toward Chico in his slinky fashion, sits under his cage and just stares. We have satanic pets...our pets seem to have made a pact with the devil.

People like to have something to turn down, though. They want to be able to say no to some things, because it makes their yes more meaningful.

And I make a little vow then, to myself. To not let the backs and forths of forgiveness interrupt the steadiness of love.

One thing you can say about daughters and mothers—like it or not, they know the truth about each other.

And right then I learn something very simple and fundamental about love. That it is there or it is not there. That some of our biggest troubles probably come when we try to convince ourselves it is there when it isn’t, or that it isn’t there when it is.

[A]pparently, it's okay to WORK as a waitress but not to BE a waitress.

It's some twisted, limited, grocery-store mentality, where people have to be dairy products or vegetables or frozen foods for us to be able to understand them and feel safe. Maybe we've just become such mega-consumers that we can't deal with anything that's slightly inconvenient (basically, anything that requires thought). I was the tofu amidst the Baking Products and Cleaning Supplies.

guess forgiveness, like happiness, isn’t a final destination. You don’t one day end up there and get to stay. It’s there, it’s not there. It’s in and out, like the surf I could hear outside my window as I lay in that bed. Sometimes forgiveness is so far away you can barely imagine its possibility, and other times, surprising times, like when a tiki man is looking at you from a bedside table, it is a sudden, unexpected visitor who stays briefly before moving on.

And maybe that’s the closest definition for the word we can get, a life equation: An absence of wanting equals happiness.

The word just hangs, until Severin starts the blender and there's only the sound of crunching and grinding vitamins, the silvery core of nourishment, containing every essential thing but the nourishment itself.