Great Big Beautiful Life

“I am who I am. I like the things I like. I’m good at the things I’m good at. And my mom—she’s her. Telling her that it hurts my feelings that she’s not interested in my work won’t change how she actually feels. She’ll just act different. And I don’t need that. I don’t want her to pretend to think what I do has value. That would feel so much worse to me.”

“It’s just that somehow, almost everything you say makes me want to kiss you.”

“He was the love of her life, and he let the world make him too small for her.”

“When you don’t have the people who love you around, reminding you who you are, that story feels bigger and realer than anything else. You lose yourself inside the character with your name and face.”

“But this is who I am, and even if you don’t understand it, couldn’t you just pretend for a few days a year that you respect me? That you like me? Because I can’t figure out how to be anyone else, and it’s lonely, it’s so fucking lonely being the person who doesn’t belong in this family.”

“For the one you love? Anything. You unmake the world and build a new one. You do anything to give them what they need.”

“Pretending everything’s fine only works for so long. And I don’t know. It freaks me out a little, that I could…that I could feel like this, about someone who’s good at pretending to be fine. That I could miss it, if you’re actually not. It was about me. Like you said.”

“It feels like you’ve lived their whole life with them. And I just can’t help but think, we’re not supposed to know how it all ends, this early. It’s too much of a burden.”

“Don’t try to talk me out of it, Alice. Every time we try to protect each other, all it does is cost us more time together, and I’m not willing to lose any more. I want to be with you. Nothing else is going to matter to me more than that. Not at the end of my life. Not even now. Nothing will matter more than who I spent my time with, and I want it to be you. I need it to be you.”

“Sometimes I just miss this. Being close to someone. Being touched. Not just sex, I mean.”

“I feel like you’re mine. Like you’re mine in a way no one else ever has been.”

“But if you want something done right, you don’t go with easy. I’ve thought about it, and this is how I want to do it.”

“Remembering my decisions don’t make much of a difference in the end.”

“Because then, suddenly, they’re incredibly proud, but they’re proud of the accomplishment, not of the work. So you feel like you have to keep accomplishing instead of just creating. It affirms the idea that the value in what you do is how people react to it, and not just in the making of it. I’ve written stuff I’m really proud of that hardly anyone read. I’ve written stuff I’m proud of that no one liked. That doesn’t mean it didn’t deserve to be written.”

“I wanted to punish them, honestly, but I couldn’t figure out any way to do it. The best I could come up with was giving them more spectacle, feeding their unquenchable thirst for drama. They wanted a madwoman, and that’s what I was. I ripped up our gardens and left all the flowers in trash cans at the gate. I left the house barefoot, and chopped off my hair with a pair of kitchen scissors. I wore the same dress I’d worn to our wedding to the burial, and I relished every headline about my deranged behavior, because at least it seemed like proof that I had some control over who they said I was. After a couple of weeks, that stopped soothing the ache and all I wanted was to be alone. To feel my pain completely, without interruption. I sent my mother home, paid the staff, and let them go.”

“I’ve always felt most myself when I’m alone.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but you sound like a robot learning to love.”

“Inappropriate? I didn’t think so. Curious? Exceptionally, seeing as how my husband had to have passed away at least thirty years before you were even born.”