Truly Madly Magically

Life hurts. Love hurts. Maybe hurting is how you know it's working--like every healer's cure I've ever taken, the ache is how you heal. The pain is the whole point. This is how a person is alive, not numbed into nothingness. Not hiding and ignoring and twisting all that hurt into anger. Anger is heavy; sometimes, it doesn't serve.

Maybe the thing about really, truly being okay is choosing to be. And the doing it.

I want to be the kind of person who comforts other people instead of bludgeoning them with my own awkwardness and insecurity.

Eventually she sighs, still plucking at her skirt. “Sometimes a woman, even in spirit, gets tired of being angry.

She trails off. Then she shakes her head and gets that dreamy look about her that I’ve come to realize is her disguise. I used to think she was an airhead. Now I think she likes people to think that she is.

Evil so often hides in plain sight, under endless speeches and bureaucratic red tape most people don’t have the energy to wade through.

As if tears aren’t always a sign of unbearable weakness, like they are when you’re half human in a world of full witches. As if maybe, sometimes, they’re no more and no less than a sign of too many things to feel at once and no words for them.

It’s too much to think about everything it took to get here. Too much to think of all that lies ahead. So I just focus on this. Here. Now. Him. Us.

No one will ever like their leader one hundred percent of the time. A leader’s function isn’t to be liked. It’s to be honest, and honorable, and true.

maybe it’s good to practice all the ways to be happy for your kid even when it’s not the way you would be happy.

They don’t just want us to lose. They want us to suffer.

Because none of it is true, or even really about her, so why should she care? The angry things people say behind your back and even to your face have more to do with them than the person you are.

I don’t know how you go from holding a baby’s entire life inside your body to letting them go off and fight battles they can’t possibly win.