The Night Olivia Fell

He had the air of someone who imagines he can negotiate with gravity.

But there are no redos in life. You can’t go back and make things better. All you can do is live with it and move forward.

You don’t have to be right one hundred percent of the time to show you love someone.

To feel love was to feel fear—you just couldn’t let it dictate your life. Love was a risk, but it opened up a world of possibility, one you would never experience without it.

Sometimes the rest of your life arrived by simply saying good-bye.

reminded me that the first hour of every new day starts with darkness—and then the sunshine comes.

Trust, I’d learned, was the greatest gift you could give, the greatest gift to receive. The belief that a person wouldn’t betray you required a strength and confidence

Suicide of a parent, that type of abandonment, it did things to a person. It didn’t take a shrink to tell me that I didn’t trust people to stay because my mom had promised she’d be there and then wasn’t.

Loss, death, a broken heart, no matter how figurative, was unbearable. There was never a guarantee you wouldn’t lose those you loved.

Being a parent is one long process of daring yourself to let go. Sometimes worry and love and control, all get jumbled up until you can't see the difference.

think coming. I would make them see me, take me seriously.

I was ten and she was twenty, when our mother left me on Sarah’s front step with nothing but a backpack of dirty clothes. She’d gone home and killed herself that very day, leaving Sarah to raise me.

I hit the river on my back, my eyes fastened on the bridge’s soaring spires illuminated by a flickering streetlamp.

Our cheeks were stretched wide with laughter. We were laughing because we knew each other and we were alive and because there was so much to look forward to. She was my mom and I was her daughter, and there was nothing more important than that.

What do you do when you know something and nobody will listen? When you need answers and nobody will provide them? When you can’t trust anybody to help you?

You don't have to be right one hundred percent of the time to show you love someone. And she doesn't have to be perfect to be well loved.

Their eyes landed like hot wax against my face, and then slid away.