Magnolia Parks Into The Dark Quotes

and I love her in the dark. I mean, fuck it—I down and out love her in all spectrums of light, even the absence of it.

If it wasn’t him, it would be you,” I tell him, for better and for worse. He blows some more air out of his mouth and catches my eye. “In another life, yeah?” I nod and offer him a weak smile. “I’ll meet you there.

You’re all here to bury the smartest girl, the sharpest shooter in the whole wide world. But I’m burying my guiding light.

A love like ours—? Are you joking?” I give her the magic smile. “We’re what the poems are about

Will you walk me down the aisle?” I ask him. “At the wedding?” He looks down at me and smiles a bit. “Honour of a lifetime.

How many loves do you get in a lifetime? That’s a question I’ve wondered before … If you ask The Sun, I’ve had far too many, and in some ways that’s true, I have. But actually, I’ve only had two great ones.

Wherever she is, it’s good. I know it is.” “How?” I ask. He shrugs like it’s easy. “Because she’s there.

What do I have to show for this life? Her. It’s her. Loving her. That’s all I’ve got, and he’s saying I’ve not even fucking done that well. Everyone has markers for their life. Ways they remember certain things and times. Stakes in the ground. She’s mine. My whole life, all dotted with and by things I remember about her. She’s how I frame the world.

I feel that it's important for you to know that even if I didn't love you in the sort of stupid, embarrassing way that I do; if I did, hypothetically, have a choice - I would choose you anyway.

He lets out my favourite laugh that feels like a cup of tea on a rainy day, and his face looks the kind of happy I always want it to with a smile that touches his eyes.

You want a metaphor for it? Alright, here goes. I come from a good family, everyone knows that. My parents were great, roof over my head. I never wanted for much, really, and still. She’s the only home I’ve ever been interested in having. Her body is the walls, heart’s the ceiling. I’ll live here forever.

Not a day has gone by since I met you where I’ve not loved you.

I’ve been without him before, it’s not a life I’m interested in having

But you see, the thing about stars is that in another galaxy, that star is also a sun. “If it wasn’t him, it would be you,” I tell him, for better and for worse. He blows some more air out of his mouth and catches my eye. “In another life, yeah?” I nod and offer him a weak smile. “I’ll meet you there.

Terrible days are sneaks, aren’t they? They love to lull you into a false sense of safety. Dress themselves up in the terrible mundane, make you think that everything’s okay when actually, nothing is.

Everyone moves around me these days like I’m made of glass. Like one wrong look and I’ll shatter. Little do they know that it’s too late . . . All of me already is all shattered. A mosaic of cracks and agony.

See you soon?” I say to our reflection. She’d give me a small smile, and I think she’d be a bit sad because I know how much she loves me. “Not too soon, please,” she’d say, because that’s not what she’d want for me. “Not too soon,” I say, nodding. “But one day again.” And then I close my little mirror, lay it down next to her ashes and let her go.

The curves of his chest carved into my memory the same way you won’t ever forget your best day. He is my best day.

It was always him. I knew that, even at the time, even when I tried to fill the gap he left in me with other people, it was and always will be him.

She’s the only home I’ve ever been interested in having. Her body is the walls, heart’s the ceiling. I’ll live here forever.

To anyone whom the more sting-y parts of this book resonate with, anyone who’s grieved or is grieving or has lost or is losing, anyone who worries about the black, empty nothingness . . . everything is going to be okay. Okay?

You are the thing that the poets write about, you are what the choir of angels is singing about, you are the thing that clouds part above and the sun beams down upon. You're every butterfly, in every stomach. You're my every tender thought.

What do I have to show for this life? Her. It’s her. Loving her.

and I think it’s amazing how time and space mean naught in matters of the heart.

I’ve loved this face all my life. It’s the sun I pray to, and if what we have is a temple, I built it with my bare hands—I nearly died trying to build this fucking thing. Built it til my hands were raw and bloodied. And I’ll die on the altar of loving her, happily too. That’s not a waste to me.

There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point . . . The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful and full and as wonderful as we choose to make it.

I wish I could tell you all the ways that I tell you I love you without telling you that I love you, but I don’t know what they are—” She kind of sighs and I look for her eyes. “Because I think at this point all of me is a big fucking ode to just loving you—

I think surprise deaths are the worst. Do you ever think about it? How you love a person who’s made of mostly bone? Because it’s all I think about now. That the thing protecting the heart I would do anything for—that I’d die for—all that’s protecting it is a ribby cage made from collagen, calcium phosphate and calcium carbonate. That’s it. And some muscle.

I am the fox and you are the flower, and you have tamed me.

Please don’t quote Shrek What’s ‘Shrek’? I hate you ??

You are the thing I have to show for in my life, and that won’t ever not be enough to me.

He lets out my favourite laugh that feels like a cup of tea on a rainy day,

But you see, the thing about stars is that in another galaxy, that star is also a sun. "If it wasn't him, it would be you.

Because getting to love you has been the most wonderfully human thing I’ve ever had the privilege of doing in my life

I feel that it’s important you know that even if I didn’t love you in the sort of stupid, embarrassing way that I do; if I did, hypothetically, have a choice—I would choose you anyway.

She reached over and rubbed my boyfriend’s arm affectionately and it made me and Harley both roll our eyes, though admittedly it was difficult to blame her because while every other body on the planet is made up of 60 percent water, Baxter James Ballentine is 60 percent sunshine, and if you could squeeze the arm of Sunshine, of course you would.

We’ve walked down this road before, a thousand times, we know it well. It’s dark and shadowy and one of us always emerges with an arm gnawed off or a broken bone or heart.

No—” I sigh, forlorn. “No, we look like the kind of couple who would tag one another in their Instagram biographies.” “Oh, fuck—” BJ starts to laugh. “We do a bit.

If you’re lucky, you might get a great one, and I know I’m the luckiest, because I got two.

Hardly a schlep, Parks.” “Emotionally it is,” she told me

He was something for you when I couldn’t be, and I should have been, so I can’t even like—be shitty about it, because I’m sort of glad he was there.

and maybe still my best chance for surviving is letting go of everything that is or has been hurting me.

maybe you’ll remember—sometimes we’d do.

Not a day has gone by since I met you where I’ve not loved you.” I drink in those words like they’re water, let them douse the burning fear that lives inside of me that he’ll hurt me again.

You know the feeling? When you like someone and they like you back and then something shifts for them but not for you and you're left standing there wondering what happened and what changed?

How many loves do you get in a lifetime—” She gives me a quick smile. “That is a question I’ve pondered on for a lot of years now . . . And I’ve come up with varying degrees of the same answer. That there are lots of different kinds of love that life may afford you the chance to experience over the course of one’s life—some terrible, some misguided, some well-meaning, some dangerous, some wonderful but benign, some painful, some—when you lose them—are agony.” She sniffs and swallows. “If you’re lucky, you might get a great one, and I know I’m the luckiest, because I got two.

ADHD is crazy, actually. My brain, how fast it moves at any given moment—that the hyperactivity, it’s not me bouncing off walls, it’s a thousand thoughts each minute bouncing off the walls in my head.

You are the thing that the poets wrote about, you are what the choir of angels is singing about, you are the thing that clouds part above and the sun beams down upon. You’re every butterfly, in every stomach. You’re my every tender thought. “You’re a warm towel when you get out of the shower on a cold night. You’re the tea you hold to your chest when you need a minute to yourself. You’re the feeling you get when you’re inside and safe and dry and it’s dark grey outside and it’s teeming down.

Enough with the eating shit,” she’d say, voice stern. “You’re done with that, yeah?” I say nothing, and she’d give me a look. “Magnolia, you’re smart enough to develop a coping mechanism for your lack of control in the world that doesn’t involve you emaciating yourself.

I imagine being wanted by Beej feels like the high people want from narcotics. Best feeling in the world. Sometimes I can’t see straight in the pursuit of it. Look at my track record, it’s right there. I’ll do anything to make him want me. He is the master and I’m just a dog doing tricks to please him.

They were crying because death is scary and uncomfortable and highlights certain things within ourselves that without the threat of mortality pressing in on our consciousness, we’d otherwise ignore, but those such things demand attention at a funeral. Mortality doesn’t just press against you, it body slams you to the floor.

So you aren’t still in love with her?” I ask, eyebrows up, curious. “You’re over it? Over her? Sayonara, Daisy—” “Well—” His brows bend in the middle. BJ gives me a gentle but firm smile. “Magnolia.” “Oh—” I look at my fiancé. “Too much?” He gives me a tight smile. “You could try not talking for twenty seconds. See what happens.” I don’t do that. Instead I give Tiller an apologetic smile. “See, I was recently diagnosed with ADHD—” “Oh.” Tiller nods, not knowing what to say. “It impairs my prefrontal cortex—something about a neurotransmitter in the brain and then also lower levels of dopamine—which is so rude—don’t you think that’s so rude? Dopamine’s pretty nice—my doctor said it’s probably why I love shopping so much. And sex—

500,000 people are murdered every year—also not fair. Also horrible, and terrifying, and speaks to a darkness in our world that is so catastrophically unbearable and uncontainable and if there are 500,000 people being murdered, then it would be fair to infer that there are then too approximately 500,000 murderers, so then what’s to stop the random man on the street turning around and knifing you in the head because he felt like it? Heads are important.

In Greek mythology, when they were first created, the humans had four arms and four legs and a head with two faces. And then when the humans tried to climb Mount Olympus Zeus considered them a proper threat, so he split them in half and they were condemned to spend forever looking for their other half to make them whole again. Lucky for me, I found her when I was six. Been a bit of a fucking journey but here we are—pretty Greek, this journey of ours, all things considered. An odyssey of our own.

I can look back now over our life and see it in traces of everything. Good and bad. Great and terrible. Bit of a short straw to call it a disorder, I think. It’s a shit hat to make her wear all the time because she’s got the best brain in the world, I love how she looks at everything, how she sees it all—I don’t even mind the part where she just says whatever the fuck floats into her head at any given moment—the only part of it that I struggle with these day—all days, I s’pose—is the future myopia.

Don’t know if there even is such a thing as “worse” when it comes to grief. I’ve kind of come to think of grief the same way you might think about drowning. Drowning is drowning, some people might be drowning for longer than others, some drowning might put you on a whole new path once you’re through it, sometimes it might change how your brain works if you’re cut off from oxygen for long enough, could even cost you your life—the severity of the drowning incident might be scalable but the drowning itself, the grief itself, it’s all water you can’t breathe in.

ADHD is crazy, actually. My brain, how fast it moves at any given moment—that the hyperactivity, it’s not me bouncing off walls, it’s a thousand thoughts each minute bouncing off the walls in my head. And there are parts of it that are wonderful, I notice things other people don’t, I’m detail-oriented, I pick up patterns well, I think I’m quite clever, truthfully. I like how I think. I wasn’t sad when they diagnosed me with it, it made a lot of things about me make sense, and about us and how I am and how I can be and why—it answered a lot. It can be bad though. It can be a waterboarding of thoughts. Just—cloth over my brain’s face, and all the thoughts in the world being poured over my mouth and nose and you can’t breathe because if you do you’ll choke on them—

From Tomorrow to Yesterday The tree trunks move in time with the rhythm of her rubber soles on the wet path, where the air is still cool after the night rain. The woodland floor is white with anemones; in one place, growing close to the roots of an ancient tree, they make her think of an old, wrinkled hand. She could go on and on without getting tired, without meeting anyone or thinking of anything in particular, and without coming to the edge of the woods. As if the town did not begin just behind the trees, the leafy suburb with its peaceful roads and its houses hidden behind close-trimmed hedges. She doesn't want to think about anything, and almost succeeds; her body is no more than a porous, pulsating machine. The sun breaks through the clouds as she runs back, its light diffused on the gravel drive and the magnolia in front of the kitchen window. His car is no longer parked beside hers, he must have left while she was in the woods. He hadn't stirred when she rose, and she'd already been in bed when he came home late last night. She lay with her back turned, eyes closed, as he undressed, taking care not to wake her. She leans against one of the pillars of the garage and stretches, before emptying the mailbox and letting herself into the house. She puts the mail on the kitchen table. The little light on the coffeemaker is on; she switches it off. Not so long ago, she would have felt a stab of irritation or a touch of tenderness, depending on her mood. He always forgets to turn off that machine. She puts the kettle on, sprinkles tea leaves into the pot, and goes over to the kitchen window. She observes the magnolia blossoms, already starting to open. They'll have to talk about it, of course, but neither of them seems able to find the right words, the right moment. She pauses on her way through the sitting room. She stands amid her furniture looking out over the lawn and the pond at the end of the garden. The canopies of the trees are dimly reflected in the shining water. She goes into the bathroom. The shower door is still spotted with little drops. As time went on they have come to make contact during the day only briefly, like passing strangers. But that's the way it has been since the children left home, nothing unusual in that. She takes off her clothes and stands in front of the mirror where a little while ago he stood shaving. She greets her reflection with a wry smile. She has never been able to view herself in a mirror without this moue, as if demonstrating a certain guardedness about what she sees. The dark green eyes and wavy black hair, the angularity of her features. She dyes her hair exactly the color it would have been if she hadn't begun to go gray in her thirties, but that's her only protest against age.

Chip and I were both exhausted when we finally pulled up in front of that house, but we were still riding the glow of our honeymoon, and I was so excited as he carried me over the threshold--until the smell nearly knocked us over. “Oh my word,” I said, pinching my nose and trying to hold my breath so I wouldn’t gag. “What is that?” Chip flicked the light switch, and the light didn’t come on. He flicked it up and down a few times, then felt his way forward in the darkness and tried another switch. “The electricity’s off,” he said. “The girls must’ve had it shut off when they moved out.” “Didn’t you transfer it back into your name?” I asked. “I guess not. I’m sorry, babe,” Chip said. “Chip, what is that smell?” It was the middle of June in Waco, Texas. The temperature had been up over a hundred degrees for days on end, and the humidity was stifling, amplifying whatever that rotten smell was coming from the kitchen. Chip always carries a knife and a flashlight, and it sure came in handy that night. Chip made his way back there and found that the fridge still had a bunch of food left in it, including a bunch of ground beef that had just sat there rotting since whenever the electricity went out. The food was literally just smoldering in this hundred-degree house. So we went from living in a swanky hotel room on Park Avenue in New York City to this disgusting, humid stink of a place that felt more like the site of a crime scene than a home at this point. Honestly, I hadn’t thought it through very well. But it was late, and we were tired, and I just focused on making the most of this awful situation. So we opened some windows and brought our bags in, and I told Jo we’d just tough it out and sleep on the floor and clean it all up in the morning. That’s when she started crying. I lay down on the floor thinking, Is his what my life is going to look like now that I married Chip? Is this my new normal? That’s when another smell hit me. It was in the carpet. “Chip, did those girls have a dog here?” I asked. “They had a couple of dogs,” he answered. “Why?” You could smell it. In the carpet. It was nasty. I was just lying there with my head next to some old dog urine stain that had been heated by the Texas summer heat. It was like microwaved dog pee. It was. It was awful. It was three in the morning. And I finally said, “Chip, I’m not sleeping in this house.

It’s dark, I’m in stupid shoes. They’re trainers but they’re not made for running, those stupid Golden Goose shoes, what are they good for? They arrive tattered, they don’t make you faster—

You know how ballerinas pick a spot to look at when they’re doing a pirouette so they don’t get dizzy? Bridget was Magnolia’s spot on the wall.

There’s a new sun in the universe, and it’s hanging off my brother’s arm, walking down an aisle to me. It’s stolen all the light and all the good and all the beauty from everything else around it—if there are even things around it, I don’t know—? I can’t see them. I’m blinded.

Grief is funny like that, how it ebbs and flows from you, it’s not corked like champagne, a bottle that bursts open, fizzes all out until it’s empty. It’s more like a kind of weather. A kind of wind. Sometimes it’s these horrible gusts that you feel undeniably, hurts your ears, makes you close your eyes, chills you right down to your bones, some days it’s a pleasant breeze that blows across your face and it’s neither sad or bad, it’s just some kind of unspeakable tenderness. Some days you feel no breeze, that’s started happening to me—I don’t know how I feel about it yet—not that I don’t think of her, I sort of think I’ll think of her every day for forever, but more that, when I do, it doesn’t necessarily feel like someone’s dropping a crystal vase inside my chest. That’s not to say I don’t still have days where I’m a glassware shop situated somewhere along the San Andreas Fault and there’s an earthquake and things are falling and breaking everywhere, but there was a time where every day felt like the big one California’s waiting for—just total demolition. I suppose it doesn’t feel like total destruction anymore.

Daniela’s waiting on the other side of the door. She said it’s to make sure no one’s out there, but I actually just don’t think she’s terribly invested in my dresses, which I sort of like but also find a bit strange and frankly confusing.

June fifth, next year.

Harry Styles catches the tube,” he offers.

He also chokes people with a sea view.

...if I loved myself more than I love her, I would have cut the ties between us as soon as she started to strangle me with them. If I loved me more, I would have let me drift away. into the dark, out of her light but I didn't, and I couldn't and I won't because when it comes to her, I have zero instinct for self preservation. I'll die in her arms or at her doorstep trying to get back into them, I don't give a fuck.

The lights go off and she stares at me through the darkness a few seconds longer, and I love her in the dark. I mean, fuck it—I down and out love her in all spectrums of light, even the absence of it.

She’ll crawl into it in the morning anyway, that I know. She finds it less threatening to lay on my bed in the daylight, like she doesn’t trust herself with me in the dark.

I think death brushes up against nearly everyone at some point or another, but it’s properly danced with me. Grabbed me by the hand, spun me, dipped me . . . taught me to waltz. I knew life through the prism of loss, secretly at first, but now it’s coloured my world. It’s the summertime here at the minute, but I’m terrified of the autumn because then death is everywhere. And it masks itself in colours all bright, but it’s still a season of dying

Because your skin is so thin, and underneath it there isn’t anything that can help you against a tonne of twisty, sharp metal that’s just trying to scrape the meat of you clean off your bones. The metal wraps around you and tries to make you one with it, like it’s an intimate moment between you, and maybe that’s because all death is.

What’s her name?” “Sasha.” I give him a look. “Full name.” He pauses for a second. “—Sloan.” I pull a face. “That’s a singer,” I say at the same time a flash of annoyance flashes over his face and he says, “Fuck, that’s a singer.

zucchini!

BJ, what if he comes for the tree?” BJ’s face pulls in a sort of fearful strain and he says nothing, because what can he say? I wouldn’t put it past Harley at this point. Mr Gibbs puts a hand on her shoulder. “I won’t let him through the gate.

Really striking, funny. Daddy issues …” “Yeah, but—” I shrug. “Who doesn’t have those?

And then no one says anything for about twelve seconds, which is such a long time, so then I say, “I don’t have very big boobs.

I don’t really know when it started. Can’t have been long after Bridge. I don’t know what it was . . . Heightened emotions or something? Everyone distracted? Maybe the sneaking around was hot, I don’t know—? I don’t think it was planned. Just happened, I s’pose.

Marching Bands of Manhattan” by Death Cab for Cutie

To the long-awaited wedding of Baxter James Ballentine and Magnolia Parks.

I now pronounce you husband and wife,

your friends are all in varying crises of their own and there's no one really to unpack something that happened five years ago with because everyone's tired of talking about it but it's still the biggest deal in the world to you even though it isn't and everything's fine - sometimes the mind does wonder, you know?

Are you okay?” he asks, arms open, and I walk into them how I always have, the same way you walk into a church. A bit broken and looking for salvation.

Christian and Daisy are—fuck it, never mind—talk to one of them.

I was useless—sort of normal for me these days

Billie Ballentine.

Food, she can control. She’s controlled food for a long time. An easy thing for her to both demonise and weaponise against the actual thing she’s actually afraid of.

Her staying here isn’t dead unheard of—better her in Henry’s bed than BJ’s—but how many beds will she go through before she circles back to mine? She’ll crawl into it in the morning anyway, that I know. She finds it less threatening to lay on my bed in the daylight, like she doesn’t trust herself with me in the dark.

Hey, isn’t that Daisy Haites—” Bridge nods her chin towards the door. Daisy Haites. Haites, as in, Julian. Yes, that Julian. The gang lord who somehow still manages to appear in GQ and gets write-ups in VICE. Jonah’s other closest friend, I’d say. Daisy’s his sister. She’s a few years younger than me, completely beautiful, sort of terrifying: dark brown hair, bright hazel eyes and skin a little more tan than your standard-issue white girl.

At least stay here til you move—” “Fine, yes.” Bushka nods. “They do so much sex.” “No—” Magnolia starts shaking her head. “They do,” Bushka nods. “Like animal. Bang bang bang all day.” Magnolia scrunches her face up. “But your sex—” Bushka continues. “Is okay!” “Oh, good—” I stare over at Parks, eyes wide. “You are young,” Bushka tells us. “Have fun, is good to have orgasm, yes?” She pats me on the arm for a job well done. “Good.” “I take it back—” Magnolia shakes her head. “You can leave.” “I go to my room now,” Bushka says, ignoring Parks, already walking to it. “—Not your room!” Magnolia yells down the hall.

If that doesn’t make you perfect then”—I shrug—“perfect doesn’t exist. And if it does, and it’s not that, then it’s stupid anyway, and I don’t want it.

I’ve never looked shit a day in my life.

Kind of wished it was.

I love her in the dark. I mean, fuck it - I down and out love her in all spectrums of light, even the absence of it.

You’re the only person I’ve ever loved, Magnolia.” I hear myself make the faintest gasp and I stare over at him, mouth agape.

shook my head and caught Tom England—that sweet man—sitting in the crowd with his parents, Clara and that boyfriend of hers. Tom gave me a weighted smile and my eyes filled up with tears that I blinked away quickly.

Told me that there were a lot of different ways you can betray someone you love, one of them is letting them hurt themselves.

Did you love me?” My head pulls back and I blink five times quickly. I swallow, shaking my head as I stare over at him with big, confused eyes. “Why would you—” “Call it closure,” he tells me with a decided nod. “From what?” I frown. “You always said we weren’t together.” “And you always said we were,” he fires back. I flick my eyes to the roof of the car, press my tongue into the roof of my mouth and breathe out a shallow laugh. “Why are you asking me this?” “I don’t know—” he says, face strained as it watches me. “I just need to know how to pocket this in my mind.

This!” I repeat, maybe sort of yelling. “What ‘this’!” “Us.” I purse my lips and glare over at him. “There is no us,” I tell him because that’s what he always told me, and then he sniffs, annoyed because he knows I’m quoting him. I do ever so love to use a man’s own words against him. Julian runs his tongue slowly over his bottom lip. “Yes, there was,” he tells the window before he looks back over at me, and his eyes look like a water planet.

You love Daisy,” I tell him quietly, I don’t know why—it’s all I can think to say. He shakes his head and his eyebrows look too heavy. “Not how I love you.” I stare over at him, a tiny bit afraid. “Loved,” I say. “Right? He nods quickly, licking his lips. “Right.