if you try. You will have hope, and you have been forgiven. Forgiveness, which takes you back to the person you were and lets you reset them. Hope, which exists in a future in which you are new. Forgiveness and hope are miracles. They let you change your life. They are time-travel.

mean to sound pessimistic. I only do because I can see how wrong my choices were. Don’t do it like this. Don’t enter believing yourself a node in a grand undertaking, that your past and your trauma will define your future, that individuals don’t matter. The most radical thing I ever did was love him, and I wasn’t even the first person in this story

I don’t

I know how much you’ve longed for your future to lean down and cup your face, to whisper “Don’t worry, it gets better.”

The truth is, it won’t get better if you keep making the same mistakes. It can get better, but you must allow yourself to imagine a world in which you are better.

suppose I mean to say that I’d betrayed him, because he’d been told I was his anchor, and instead I insisted he become mine. Betrayed him in other ways too, of course, by keeping secrets from him and reporting on him. But that was all in the original job description.

When I saw him there, lying still on his back and staring at the ceiling, I felt a shiver of wrongness.

Esquimaux

rhapsodies