The First Time She Drowned

part of being healthy is being able to hold and remember who people actually are instead of who we wish they were. It’s a daily struggle against a brain that tends to want to cling to fairy-tale hope, but it’s also the only way to guarantee a life surrounded by those who build rather than destroy. In the end, the loss is about letting go of what I never had in the first place.

Today, right now, I start over. A new me.

part of being healthy is being able to hold and remember who people actually are instead of who we wish they were. It’s a daily struggle against a brain that tends to want to cling to fairy-tale hope, but it’s also the only way to guarantee a life surrounded by those who build rather than destroy.

Liz says that’s the thing about life: we only have what’s directly in front of us and it’s easy to convince ourselves that’s all there is.

It seems like something James would do, and the fact that I’ve thought of it myself comforts me, reminds me of how we keep people with us even when they are gone. It makes me think, too, that maybe the fact that I’m standing here, that I’m working toward being okay, means we can excavate and remove others who don’t feel gone enough. It’s a leap of faith, to do it differently. To learn a new way.

“And I guess I just like being nice to you. Sometimes I get the feeling that no one has been nice to you your whole life.”

Anyone up for a bong hit?

champing at the bit

Suddenly I don’t even care that I fell, because of that brief moment when I stood, and I wonder if this is what other people seem to have that I do not—this courage to fall because they have the memory of standing.

I notice that I am smiling from such a deep place that my smile is just there on my face without my having to put it there. It feels like a discovery, this smile, as if I’ve pulled it up from the bottom of the seafloor like a piece of smoothed glass or a perfect white shell—something old and forgotten underneath all that water.