These Silent Woods

The thing about grace is that you don’t deserve it. You can’t earn it. You can only accept it. Or not.

Because if your own child, the person for whom you’ve sacrificed everything, for whom you’ve broken laws as well as your own personal sense of boundaries, has lost confidence in you, and in turn, in themselves and the world at large, then what’s the point of any of it?

Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” John 15:13.

That’s the nice thing about books. You can experience all different people and all sorts of places through them. All in the safety and comfort of your own home.

Spin into regretting and wishing and remembering, and it's a vortex, that type of thinking. It'll suck you right down and you have to kick and claw your way back. Better to stay in the present.

It had been there, hadn't it? Something blooming between the two of us. A closeness. A possibility. And what had I done? Pulled away.

becoming a parent—it makes something inside of you bloom and deepen. You love as you haven’t loved before.

The thing about grace is that you don't deserve it. You can't earn it. You can only accept it. Or not.

It’ll get better, Finch. Right now the sadness is all there is. Maybe it feels like there’s something so heavy pulling at you that you’ll sink right down into the earth and never feel light again. But you will, in time. I promise.” She wipes her eyes and then asks, her voice shaking, “How long? How long does it take?” Scotland shakes his head. “I can’t say, Finch. Wish I could. It sort of differs from person to person. But time will tell. Most likely, you’ll just realize one day that you don’t feel as sad as you did the day before. And the day after that, you’ll be a little better, and so on. I’m guessing it’ll never fully go away, but it gets better.

It is no respecter of persons, war. Even if it doesn’t damage your body, it damages your soul.

The thing is, me and Judge had never gotten along, and here's why. He always saw things in black-and-white, which is maybe what judges are supposed to do. Me, I saw things how they really are: not black-and-white but a hundred shades inbetween.

Most likely, you’ll just realize one day that you don’t feel as sad as you did the day before. And the day after that, you’ll be a little better, and so on. I’m guessing it’ll never fully go away, but it gets better.

Dollhouses. Libraries. School lunches on those melamine trays. Funnel cakes and Ferris wheels. Swimming pools: the smell of chlorine in your hair, those white chairs that hue with mildew. Saturday-morning cartoons. Riding a school bus. Telephones: the comfort of hearing someone’s voice who is far away. Airplanes, the miracle of flight. The ocean. Crushes. Sleepovers with friends. Back-to-school shopping. Playing dress-up. Getting a driver’s license. Bowling alleys. Ice cream, hand-dipped. Sharing secrets with a best friend. Proms. Field trips. Movie theaters. Walmart.

Like a bird that wanders from its nest Is a man who wanders from his place. —PROVERBS 27:8

Consider how much has happened. How a life can veer and stretch and retract and shatter. How it feels in this moment, as though things could crumble yet again with just the slightest alteration. Tenuous, this life. Nothing sure at all.

I’ve always believed that if something was meant to happen, you’d have a second chance at it. But never have I been so bold as to believe in a third or even a fourth chance. Almost like the world was trying to hand you something good after all it had dealt you your whole life was heartache, like it had changed its position on who you were and what you could have. Call it what you will: karma or good luck or maybe something more. Grace.

Let it suffice for me to say this: sometimes bad things happen and you’re unprepared and you make choices that seem good to you at the time, and then you look back and wish there were things you could undo, but you can’t, and that’s that.

Here we go again: People spilling their secrets to me. My confessional curse.

Foolish, though, the thought that the very pull and push of nature could die with a person, that it could only be about love.

We survived and I have relived what I did that day ten thousand times over

It is no respecter of persons

The end, that’s what I’d been waiting for, but that was no way to live, and meanwhile, we were unprepared for the here and now.

We have gone over the ethics of the woods. We live it every day and have since she was a baby. You do not kill something just to kill. But also: you relieve suffering when you can.

For some reason the story in the Bible where Jesus is in the Garden of Gethsemane keeps roiling through my mind: Jesus asking God whether there is some other way. Not that I'm comparing myself to Jesus, mind you. But the wanting there to be an alternative, a different path. Some way to avoid the heartache that looms just ahead. Terrible feeling, to know that though it's not here yet, something bad is aiming toward you, lumbering its way closer. And to know that you do indeed have a choice: it's on you. You could decide not to. You could back out. You could run.

now the sadness is all there is. Maybe it feels like there’s something so heavy pulling at you that you’ll sink right down into the earth and never feel light again. But you will