Needlepoint Pillows With Quotes

People like to say that the opposite of love is not hate but indifference. There tends to be a whispered reverence around the expression, as if it has magical healing powers. Better to be hated than ignored by that angry ex of yours; better to be hated than ignored, generally. Otherwise, you may spend your life staring straight down the barrel of the opposite of love. But I think that's bullshit. Nonsense print copy for a paper towel. A sound bit e to needlepoint on a throw pillow. Could indifference really be worse than hate? How depressing to think we could be spending most of our days surrounded by people who feel something worse than hate toward us.

This is the opposite of love, I realize, when I look over and see my empty couch, see right through my imaginary companions. The opposite of love isn't hate; it isn't even indifference. It's fucking disembowelment. Hara-kiri. Taking a huge shovel and digging out your own heart, and your intestines, and leaving behind nothing. Nothing of yourself to give, nothing, even, to take away. Nothing but a quiet pulse and some mildly entertaining soap operas. If to love is to hand over self and heart, then this, my friend, this - to self-disembowel - is its opposite. I wish I knew how to needlepoint so I could stitch it onto a fucking pillow.

All things being equal, why not be married to a rich man? (Somewhere, Hannah thinks, there must be a needlepoint pillow asking this very question in a cleverer way.)

After all, as it says on a needlepoint sampler or throw pillow or the occasional bumper sticker: Good girls go to heaven, but bad girls go everywhere. In high heels. Or mules by Manolo Blahnik, the strappy, tangly kind that give you blisters. And when their feet start to hurt, they bitch about it a lot, until someone agrees to carry them home. Bad girls understand that there is no point in being good and suffering in silence. What good has good ever done? We women still only make seventy-one cents, on average, for every man's dollar. We still have to listen to studies telling us that a single woman over the age of 35 had best avoid airplanes because she is more likely to die in a terrorist attack than get married.

When she had packed all the artifacts that made up their personal history into liquor store boxes, the house became strictly a feminine place. She stood with her hands on her hips, stoically accepting the absence of old Boston Celtics coasters and the tangle of fishing poles, the old dartboard from a Scots pub, the toolbox and downhill skis, the silky patterned ties which sat in the base of one box like a writing mass of snakes. Without these things, one tended to notice the bright eyelet curtains, the vase filled with yawning crocuses, a needlepoint pillow ... Overall, the house looked much like her apartment had eight years ago, before she had met him.

I was under the impression clichés could ruin you, ruin your life, your hopes and dreams, bring down your whole operation if you didn't watch it. They were gateway language, leading straight to a business major, a golfy marriage, needlepoint pillows that said things about your golf game, and a self-inflicted gunshot to the head that your family called a heart attack in your alma mater announcements. Character suicide.

It's possible there's something more to life than moving from room to room, placing myself in front of people, but still finding myself empty at the end of the day. It's possible I can find out why people accouter their lives with houses and dogs and needlepoint pillows, and it's possible this will help me understand why my own life once felt so bare. It's possible that other people want the same connection I long for and that I can give it to them. It's possible that if I treat people kindly, patiently, and with compassion, they will do the same for me. And it's possible that what I can't find in others, I can find in God.