Sometimes the people you loved left you halfway through a story. Sometimes they left you without a goodbye. And, sometimes, they stayed around in little ways. In the memory of a musical. In the smell of their perfume. In the sound of the rain, and the itch for adventure, and the yearning for that liminal space between one airport terminal and the n

a spark of something other in the mundane.

Every book is a time capsule. Who I am right now—as I’m writing this six months before The Seven Year Slip finds its way onto shelves—isn’t the person I’m going to be when you read this. Books are like a magical apartment in that way, capturing a singular point in time when an author writes a book that maybe, someday, a future you will visit and re

I loved how a book, a story, a set of words in a sentence organized in the exact right order, made you miss places you’ve never visited, and people you’ve never met.

Because of all the light and love and joy that she found in the shadows of everything that plagued her.

“Life doesn’t always go as planned. The trick is to make the most of it when it doesn’t,” she said matter-of-factly.

The kind of good that stuck to your bones, thick and warm, and coated your soul in golden light.

That was love, wasn’t it? It wasn’t just a quick drop—it was falling, over and over again, for your person. It was falling as they became new people. It was learning how to exist with every new breath. It was uncertain and it was undeniably hard, and it wasn’t something you could plan for. Love was an invitation into the wild unknown, one step at a

Grief is a weird thing. It can be a monster on your shoulder. It can be a friend sitting with you at the table. It can be a memory in a smell—the soft, delicate notes of floral perfume. Grief can find you in the middle of the night as you roll over to go back to sleep. It can even find you in your dreams.