Seven Year Slip Quotes

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.

Nothing lasts forever. Not the good things, not the bad. So just find what makes you happy, and do it for as long as you can.

Isn't it strange how the world works sometimes? It's never a matter of time, but a matter of timing.

You only live once. And if you do it right, once is all you need.

Sometimes the people you love don’t leave you with goodbyes—they just leave.

Because the things that mattered most never really left. The love stays. The love always stays, and so do we.

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.

Abe held my gaze a bit longer and then broke into an easy smile. ʺOf course, of course. This is a family gathering. A celebration. And look: hereʹs our newest member.ʺ Dimitri had joined us and wore black and white like my mother and me. He stood beside me, conspicuously not touching. ʺMr. Mazur,ʺ he said formally, nodding a greeting to both of them. ʺGuardian Hathaway.ʺ Dimitri was seven years older than me, but right then, facing my parents, he looked like he was sixteen and about to pick me up for a date. ʺAh, Belikov,ʺ said Abe, shaking Dimitriʹs hand. ʺIʹd been hoping weʹd run into each other. Iʹd really like to get to know you better. Maybe we can set aside some time to talk, learn more about life, love, et cetera. Do you like to hunt? You seem like a hunting man. Thatʹs what we should do sometime. I know a great spot in the woods. Far, far away. We could make a day of it. Iʹve certainly got a lot of questions Iʹd like to ask you. A lot of things Iʹd like to tell you too.ʺ I shot a panicked look at my mother, silently begging her to stop this. Abe had spent a good deal of time talking to Adrian when we dated, explaining in vivid and gruesome detail exactly how Abe expected his daughter to be treated. I did not want Abe taking Dimitri off alone into the wilderness, especially if firearms were involved. ʺActually,ʺ said my mom casually. ʺIʹd like to come along. I also have a number of questions—especially about when you two were back at St. Vladimirʹs.ʺ ʺDonʹt you guys have somewhere to be?ʺ I asked hastily. ʺWeʹre about to start.ʺ That, at least, was true. Nearly everyone was in formation, and the crowd was quieting. ʺOf course,ʺ said Abe. To my astonishment, he brushed a kiss over my forehead before stepping away. ʺIʹm glad youʹre back.ʺ Then, with a wink, he said to Dimitri: ʺLooking forward to our chat.ʺ ʺRun,ʺ I said when they were gone. ʺIf you slip out now, maybe they wonʹt notice. Go back to Siberia." "Actually," said Dimitri, "I'm pretty sure Abe would notice. Don't worry, Roza. I'm not afraid. I'll take whatever heat they give me over being with you. It's worth it.

I didn't need to be fixed. I just needed...to be reminded that I was human.

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 next. I hated her for leaving, and I loved her for staying as long as she could. And I would never wish this pain on anyone.

You are who you are, and you like what you like. You are you, and that's a lovely person to be.

You never commit a mundane moment to memory, thinking it'll be the last time you'll hear their voice, or see their smile, or smell their perfume. Your head never remembers the things your heart wants to in hindsight.

There was something just so reassuring about books. They had beginnings and middles and ends, and if you didn't like a part, you could skip to the next chapter. If someone died, you could stop on the last page before, and they'd live on forever. Happy endings were definite, evils defeated, and the good lasted forever.

Love was an invitation into the wild unknown, one step at a time together.

You kiss like you dance." "Terribly?" "Like someone waiting to be asked. You can just dance, Lemon. You can take the lead.

New things are scary.” “They don’t have to be.” “How are they not?” “Because some of my favorite things I haven’t even done yet.

Your life changed because of some French fries?" "The things you least expect usually do.

He was an adventure. One I suddenly knew I wanted to take.

Universal truths in butter. Secrets folded into the dough. Poetry in the spices. Romance in a chocolate. Love in a lemon pie.

If you don't fit in, fool everyone until you do.

The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality and my life, as I write this, is vital even when sad. I may wake up sometime next year without my mind again; it is not likely to stick around all the time. Meanwhile, however, I have discovered what I would have to call a soul, a part of myself I could never have imagined until one day, seven years ago, when hell came to pay me a surprise visit. It's a precious discovery. Almost every day I feel momentary flashes of hopelessness and wonder every time whether I am slipping. For a petrifying instant here and there, a lightning-quick flash, I want a car to run me over...I hate these feelings but, but I know that they have driven me to look deeper at life, to find and cling to reasons for living, I cannot find it in me to regret entirely the course my life has taken. Every day, I choose, sometimes gamely, and sometimes against the moment's reason, to be alive. Is that not a rare joy?

The sadness will last forever. It wasn’t a lie. There was sadness, and there was despair, and there was pain—but there was also laughter, and joy, and relief. There was never grief without love or love without grief, and I chose to think that my aunt lived because of them.

There was a gap between early twenties and late twenties that only people existing in bodies in their late twenties understood. You could still fight god, but you'd have to ice your knees afterward.

My aunt used to say, if you don't fit in, fool everyone until you do. She also said to keep your passport renewed, to pair red wines with meat and whites with everything else, to find work that is fulfilling to your heart as well as your head, to never forget to fall in love whenever you can find it because love is nothing if not a matter of timing, and to chase the moon. Always, always chase the moon.

Everything would run its course - come into my life and then leave again, because nothing stayed. Nothing ever stayed. But things could return.

I didn't find out who I wanted to be until I was almost 40. You have to try on a lot of shoes until you find some you like walking in. Never apologize for that.

And I knew I was falling. The kind of falling that would hurt when I hit the ground. The kind of falling that would shatter me into pieces.

I used to have lovely dinners with a man named Iwan, who told me that you could find romance in a piece of chocolate and love in a lemon pie.

For all the food lovers out there who burn popcorn in the microwave: we’d be too strong if we could cook, too

You can say things with food that you can’t quite with words sometimes.

Romance wasn't in chocolate, it was in the gasp of breath as we came up for air. It was in the way he cradled my face, the way I traced my finger over the crescent-shaped birthmark on his collarbone. It was n the way he uttered how beautiful I was, the way it made my heart soar. It was in the way I wanted to know everything about him -- his favorite songs, finally guess his favorite color.

She had always told me to chase the moon. To surround myself with people who would lasso it down in a heartbeat.

You will be happiest when you’re on your own adventure. Not Analea’s, not whoever you’re dating, not everyone who thinks you should do what you’re supposed to do—yours.

A cardboard pizza across a yellow table. A friend, lost in a memory, but alive in the taste of a half-burnt brownie. Love in a lemon pie.

I hated her for leaving, and I loved her for staying as long as she could.

Whenever I took a closer look at him, he was disorienting in the kind of way kaleidoscopes were, constantly moving and shifting, full of colors and shapes that shouldn't have gone together but did in a way that made it perfect.

Your head never remembers the things your heart wants to in hindsight.

I think," he finally said, choosing his words carefully, "that nothing lasts forever. Not the good things, not the bad. So just find what makes you happy, and do it for as long as you can.

That was the thing about my aunt, she lived in the moment because she always figured it’d be her last. There was never a rhyme or reason to it—even when she was healthy, she lived like she was dying, the taste of mortality on her tongue.

If you want something, you have to go for it. No one else will be more on your side than you.

He clicked this tongue to the roof of this mouth, studying me for a moment, his eyes a shade darker than they had been before. "I think your favorite color is yellow," he guessed, and watched as the surprise trickled across my face. "But not a bright yellow - more of a golden yellow. The color of sunflowers. That might be your favorite flower.

It was good to see you again, Lemon," before he slipped out of the conference room, and I was left, staring after him.

I never thought if it that way,” I admitted. He cocked his head. “Because you haven’t see yourself the way other people do.

She waltzed through life like she belonged at every party she was never invited to, fell in love with every lonely heart she found, and found luck in every adventure.

That was love, wasn't it? It wasn't 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 time together.

he said my name as if it meant something all its own—a spell.

I kept him at arm's length because at least there he wouldn't be able to see how broken I was. I could keep lying.

This kind of magic is heartache, I warned myself, but it didn’t matter, because a soft, almost dead part of my heart that had bloomed every summer with adventure and wonder whispered back, What do you have to lose?

I’d gone through the worst day of my life by myself, and I came out the other side a person who survived it. That was not something to fix. I didn’t need to be fixed. I just needed . . . to be reminded that I was human.

You can just dance, Lemon. You can take the lead.” “And you’ll follow?” “To the moon and back,” he replied, and I leaned forward, my hands pressed against his hard chest, and kissed him again.

no matter where I was, I would always be home. Because the things that mattered most never really left. The love stays. The love always stays, and so do we.

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 time together.

Food”—he motioned to our almost empty plates—“is a work of art. That’s what a perfect meal is—something that you don’t just eat, but something you enjoy. With friends, and family—maybe even with strangers. It’s an experience. You taste it, you savor it, you feel the story told through the intricate flavors that play out across your tongue . . . it’s magical. Romantic.

I was broke, and I was alone, and I wished he had found me seven years ago, instead.

You are who you are, and you like what you like,” he replied, and there was no sarcasm in his voice. “You are you, and that’s a lovely person to be.

Like meeting an old friend seven years later.

I loved how she spent every moment making a memory, every second living wide and full, and I hated that she never thought—never once entertained the idea—that she would have another dance in the rain.

He's gotten a lemon flower tattooed over his heart. "what do you tell people, when they ask about it?" His shyness melted into a smile, warm and gooey like chocolate. "I tell them about a girl I fell in love with at the right place but the wrong time." A knot lodged in my throat. "And what are you going to tell them now?" "That we finally got the timing right/" "A matter of time," I whispered.

You have to try on a lot of shoes until you find some you like walking in. Never apologize for that. Once I found mine, I’ve been content for twenty years.

Travel is about the gorgoues feeling of teetering in the unknown.

But mostly because he was very handsome, and I was very much attracted to him, and that was the kind of surprise that I did not see coming.

Life doesn’t always go as planned. The trick is to make the most of it when it doesn’t,

Travel is about the gorgeous feeling of teetering in the unknown.

I never got over that," he murmured, breaking away just long enough for a breath. I slid my hands up his chest. "What?" "How well you kiss. Over the last seven years," he went on, resting his forehead against mine, "I went on so many dates, I kissed so many people, I tried to fall in love again and again, and all I could think about was you." I wasn't sure what to say. "All seven years?" "Two thousand five hundred and fifty-five days. Not that I was counting," he added, because clearly he had been, and that made the butterflies in my stomach awfully happy. Seven years—seven whole years.

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. And grief—what it looks like, how it whispers, how you respond—is different for everyone.

He just looked like a loud kind of person, but he was also mesmerizing to watch. He moved through the world with this air of nonchalance - like he didn’t care what anyone else thought. It was infectious.

The sadness will last forever. It wasn’t a lie. There was sadness, and there was despair, and there was pain—but there was also laughter, and joy, and relief. There was never grief without love or love without grief

They’d seen the worst, rawest parts of me and they didn’t delete my number from their phones. I wasn’t always the easiest person to get along with, and the fact that they stuck around meant more to me than I could ever actually admit,

See, darling? she would say. You can plan everything in your life, and you'll still be taken by surprise.

It felt nice to do something for me again. To just be. No to-do lists to keep pushing myself through, no expectations. Just me.

Sometimes the people you loved left you halfway through a story. Sometimes they left you without a goodbye.

And who decides on what dues you need to pay? If you want something, you have to go for it. No one else will be more on your side than you.

You can plan everything in your life, and you'll still be taken by surprise.

there was a delicious sort of irony to reading a travel guide about a city you lived in. My aunt used to say that you could live somewhere your entire life and still find things to surprise you.

It took me years to realize that she had only told me the good parts that first summer afternoon, when she was trying to fill the silence. I was twelve when she finally told me the sad parts. She told me to pay attention - that the heartbreak was important, too.

A book is a time capsule. No matter how much I change, or will change, or will learn, this book will be stagnant. It’ll exist here, forever unchanged, along with the pieces of me that I put into the pages.

[Adapted and condensed Valedictorian speech:] I'm going to ask that you seriously consider modeling your life, not in the manner of the Dalai Lama or Jesus - though I'm sure they're helpful - but something a bit more hands-on, Carassius auratus auratus, commonly known as the domestic goldfish. People make fun of the goldfish. People don't think twice about swallowing it. Jonas Ornata III, Princeton class of '42, appears in the Guinness Book of World Records for swallowing the greatest number of goldfish in a fifteen-minute interval, a cruel total of thirty-nine. In his defense, though, I don't think Jonas understood the glory of the goldfish, that they have magnificent lessons to teach us. If you live like a goldfish, you can survive the harshest, most thwarting of circumstances. You can live through hardships that make your cohorts - the guppy, the neon tetra - go belly-up at the first sign of trouble. There was an infamous incident described in a journal published by the Goldfish Society of America - a sadistic five-year-old girl threw hers to the carpet, stepped on it, not once but twice - luckily she'd done it on a shag carpet and thus her heel didn't quite come down fully on the fish. After thirty harrowing seconds she tossed it back into its tank. It went on to live another forty-seven years. They can live in ice-covered ponds in the dead of winter. Bowls that haven't seen soap in a year. And they don't die from neglect, not immediately. They hold on for three, sometimes four months if they're abandoned. If you live like a goldfish, you adapt, not across hundreds of thousands of years like most species, having to go through the red tape of natural selection, but within mere months, weeks even. You give them a little tank? They give you a little body. Big tank? Big body. Indoor. Outdoor. Fish tanks, bowls. Cloudy water, clear water. Social or alone. The most incredible thing about goldfish, however, is their memory. Everyone pities them for only remembering their last three seconds, but in fact, to be so forcibly tied to the present - it's a gift. They are free. No moping over missteps, slip-ups, faux pas or disturbing childhoods. No inner demons. Their closets are light filled and skeleton free. And what could be more exhilarating than seeing the world for the very first time, in all of its beauty, almost thirty thousand times a day? How glorious to know that your Golden Age wasn't forty years ago when you still had all you hair, but only three seconds ago, and thus, very possibly it's still going on, this very moment." I counted three Mississippis in my head, though I might have rushed it, being nervous. "And this moment, too." Another three seconds. "And this moment, too." Another. "And this moment, too.

She had this far-off look in her eyes. “I thought I could find her, that it would be easy—that it would be like seeing someone you once knew on a crowded sidewalk, and your eyes meet, and time stands still. But time never stands still,” she added bitterly. “A lot can happen in seven years.

This scene would go in the section of the travel guide labeled “Scenic Spots” because I wouldn’t get tired of looking at his face for years—decades. I wanted to watch it age, I wanted to see what kind of wrinkles knitted into his smiles.

I wanted it to be me, but there was an itch under my skin that was growing by the day. A feeling like I was in a box too small, a collar too tight. And I was afraid of it, because I’d spent so long trying to find somewhere permanent to stay.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I'd planned to speak to you tonight to report on the state of the Union, but the events of earlier today have led me to change those plans. Today is a day for mourning and remembering. Nancy and I are pained to the core by the tragedy of the shuttle Challenger. We know we share this pain with all of the people of our country. This is truly a national loss. Nineteen years ago, almost to the day, we lost three astronauts in a terrible accident on the ground. But we've never lost an astronaut in flight. We've never had a tragedy like this. And perhaps we've forgotten the courage it took for the crew of the shuttle. But they, the Challenger Seven, were aware of the dangers, but overcame them and did their jobs brilliantly. We mourn seven heroes: Michael Smith, Dick Scobee, Judith Resnik, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Gregory Jarvis, and Christa McAuliffe. We mourn their loss as a nation together. For the families of the seven, we cannot bear, as you do, the full impact of this tragedy. But we feel the loss, and we're thinking about you so very much. Your loved ones were daring and brave, and they had that special grace, that special spirit that says, "Give me a challenge, and I'll meet it with joy." They had a hunger to explore the universe and discover its truths. They wished to serve, and they did. They served all of us. We've grown used to wonders in this century. It's hard to dazzle us. But for twenty-five years the United States space program has been doing just that. We've grown used to the idea of space, and, perhaps we forget that we've only just begun. We're still pioneers. They, the members of the Challenger crew, were pioneers. And I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle's take-off. I know it's hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It's all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons. The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we'll continue to follow them. I've always had great faith in and respect for our space program. And what happened today does nothing to diminish it. We don't hide our space program. We don't keep secrets and cover things up. We do it all up front and in public. That's the way freedom is, and we wouldn't change it for a minute. We'll continue our quest in space. There will be more shuttle flights and more shuttle crews and, yes, more volunteers, more civilians, more teachers in space. Nothing ends here; our hopes and our journeys continue. I want to add that I wish I could talk to every man and woman who works for NASA, or who worked on this mission and tell them: "Your dedication and professionalism have moved and impressed us for decades. And we know of your anguish. We share it." There's a coincidence today. On this day three hundred and ninety years ago, the great explorer Sir Francis Drake died aboard ship off the coast of Panama. In his lifetime the great frontiers were the oceans, and a historian later said, "He lived by the sea, died on it, and was buried in it." Well, today, we can say of the Challenger crew: Their dedication was, like Drake's, complete. The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honored us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and "slipped the surly bonds of earth" to "touch the face of God." Thank you.

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 next. I hated her for leaving, and I loved her for staying as long as she could.

You’re an Excel spreadsheet to my chaos.

She grew and she changed and she became someone new, as time always made you. And she had not looked back.

My aunt used to say, if you don’t fit in, fool everyone until you do.

My aunt used to tell me that summer nights in the city were made to be impossible. They were as brief as you needed them, but never long enough, when the roads stretched into the darkness, the skyscrapers climbed into the stars, and when you tipped your head back, the sky felt infinite.

He was. He absolutely was. I kept him at arm’s length because at least there he wouldn’t be able to see how broken I was. I could keep lying. I could keep pretending I was fine - because I was fine. I had to be. I didn’t like people worrying to much when they had so many other things to worry about. That was my allure, right? That you didn’t to worry about Clementine West. She always figured it out.

Nothing stayed—or so I had always thought. Nothing stayed and nothing lingered. But I was wrong. Because there was an apartment in the Monroe on the Upper East Side that was full of magic, and it taught me how to say goodbye. And it was no longer mine. That didn't matter though, because I carried all of the good moments with me, the walls and the furniture—the claw-foot tub and the robin's-egg blue chair—and the way my aunt danced me around the living room, so no matter where I was, I would always be home. Because the things that mattered most never really left. The love stays. The love always stays, and so do we.

When did you get this?" He looked down at the tattoo, and then sheepishly back at me. "About seven years ago, It's a bit faded now—" "It's a lemon flower." "Yes," he replied, looking up into my eyes, searching them. He'd gotten a lemon flower tattooed over his heart. "What do you tell people, when they ask about it?" His shyness melted into a smile, warm and gooey like chocolate. "I tell them about a girl I fell in love with at the right place but the wrong time." A knot lodged in my throat. "And what are you going to tell them now?" "That we finally got the timing right." "A matter of time," I whispered. "A matter of timing," he proposed.

The thing no one tells you, the thing you have to find out on your own through firsthand experience, is that there is never an easy way to talk about suicide. There never was, there will never be. If ever someone asked, I'd tell them the truth: that my aunt was amazing, that she lived widely, that she had the most infectious laugh, that she knew four different languages and had a passport cluttered with so many stamps from different countries that it'd make any world traveler green with envy, and that she had a monster over her shoulder she didn't let anyone else see. And in turn, that monster didn't let her see all the things she would miss. The birthdays. The anniversaries. The sunsets. The bodega on the corner that had turned into that shiplap furniture store. The monster closed her eyes to all the pain she would give the people she left—the terrible weight of missing her and trying not to blame her in all the same breath. And then you started blaming yourself. Could you have done something, been that voice that finally broke through? If you loved them more, if you paid more attention, if you were better, if you only asked, if you even knew to ask, if you could just read between the lines and— If, if, if. There is no easy way to talk about suicide. Sometimes the people you love don't leave you with goodbyes—they just leave.

The sadness will last forever. It wasn’t a lie. There was sadness, and there was despair, and there was pain—but there was also laughter, and joy, and relief. There was never grief without love or love without grief, and I chose to think that my aunt lived because of them. Because of all the light and love and joy that she found in the shadows of everything that plagued her. She lived because she loved, and she lived because she was loved, and what a lovely lifetime she gave us.

that I would give up my life readily if I found myself in war, or if my plane crashed into a desert. I would struggle tooth and nail to survive. It’s as though my life and I, having sat in opposition to each other, hating each other, wanting to escape each other, have now bonded forever and at the hip. The opposite of depression is not happiness but vitality, and my life, as I write this, is vital, even when sad. I may wake up sometime next year without my mind again; it is not likely to stick around all the time. Meanwhile, however, I have discovered what I would have to call a soul, a part of myself I could never have imagined until one day, seven years ago, when hell came to pay me a surprise visit. It’s a precious discovery. Almost every day I feel momentary flashes of hopelessness and wonder every time whether I am slipping. For a petrifying instant here and there, a lightning-quick flash, I want a car to run me over and I have to grit my teeth to stay on the sidewalk until the light turns green; or I imagine how easily I might cut my wrists; or I taste hungrily the metal tip of a gun in my mouth; or I picture going to sleep and never waking up again. I hate those feelings, but I know that they have driven me to look deeper at life, to find and cling to reasons for living. I cannot find it in me to regret entirely the course my life has taken. Every day, I choose, sometimes gamely and sometimes against the moment’s reason, to be alive. Is that not a rare joy?

She wasn’t petal-open anymore with him. She was twenty-four and seven years married when she knew. She found that out one day when he slapped her face in the kitchen. It happened over one of those dinners that chasten all women sometimes. They plan and they fix and they do, and then some kitchen-dwelling fiend slips a scorchy, soggy, tasteless mess into their pots and pans. Janie was a good cook, and Joe had looked forward to his dinner as a refuge from other things. So when the bread didn’t rise, and the fish wasn’t quite done at the bone, and the rice was scorched, he slapped Janie until she had a ringing sound in her ears and told her about her brains before he stalked on back to the store. Janie stood where he left her for unmeasured time and thought. She stood there until something fell off the shelf inside her. Then she went inside there to see what it was. It was her image of Jody tumbled down and shattered. But looking at it she saw that it never was the flesh and blood figure of her dreams. Just something she had grabbed up to drape her dreams over. In a way she turned her back upon the image where it lay and looked further. She had no more blossomy openings dusting pollen over her man, neither any glistening young fruit where the petals used to be. She found that she had a host of thoughts she had never expressed to him, and numerous emotions she had never let Jody know about. Things packed up and put away in parts of her heart where he could never find them.

No, this wasn't love. After all, I didn't know what love—romantic love, toe-curling love—felt like. So how could I fall for it? This wasn't it. It couldn't be. "You kiss like you dance," he murmured against my mouth. I broke away, suddenly appalled. "Terribly?" He laughed, but it was low and deep in his throat, half a growl, as he stole another kiss again. "Like someone waiting to be asked. You can just dance, Lemon. You can take the lead." "And you'll follow?' "To the moon and back," he replied.

I fell for every kiss he planted on me, but I'd fallen days, weeks, months, before. I fell a little in that taxi ride with a stranger, and I fell a little more when I asked that stranger seven years later, to stay. I kept falling, tumbling, not realizing I wasn't on solid ground anymore, as we had dinner and laughed over wine and danced to violin musicals, as we ate late-night fajitas in the park and walked on glittery sidewalks made of recycled plastic, tripping headlong into something so deep and terrifying and wonderful I didn't realize I had fallen at all until he came to sit beside me in front of a painting of a dead artist, and told me he loved me.

Jealousy can instigate the cruellest act, or more to the point, hatred can. Miss Bennett was the one who found Nathan lying at the bottom of the stairs in the cellar, said he must have slipped or something, especially with one leg being so much weaker than the other. They as good people never would have suspected their own daughter of pushing him. That she never showed emotion over her brother’s death was put down to trauma. I could see what they could not—a child incapable of any kind of feeling apart from selfishness. I can still picture him now, lying on his stomach, his head twisted at an unnatural angle, eyes glazed like one of Rhiannon’s dolls. She was then about seven years old with the face of an angel and a nature as cruel as anyone on death row.

I missed her every day. I missed her in ways I didn't yet understand—in ways I wouldn't find out for years to come. I missed her with this deep sort of regret, even though there was nothing I could have done. She never wanted anyone to see the monster on her shoulder, so she hid it, and when she finally took the monster's hand, it broke our hearts. It would keep breaking our hearts, everyone who knew her, over and over and over again. It was the kind of pain that didn't exist to someday be healed by pretty words and good memories. It was the kind of pain that existed because, once upon a time, so did she. And I carried that pain, and that love, and that terrible, terrible day, with me. I got comfortable with it. I walked with it. 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 next. I hated her for leaving, and I loved her for staying as long as she could. And I would never wish this pain on anyone.

I missed her every day. I missed her in ways I didn't yet understand—in ways I wouldn't find out for years to come. I missed her with this deep sort of regret, even though there was nothing I could have done. She never wanted anyone to see the monster on her shoulder, so she hid it, and when she finally took the monster's hand, it broke our hearts. It would keep breaking our hearts, everyone who knew her, over and over and over again. It was the kind of pain that didn't exist to someday be healed by pretty words and good memories. It was the kind of pain that existed because, once upon a time, so did she. And I carried that pain, and that love, and that terrible, terrible day, with me. I got comfortable with it. I walked with it. 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 next. I hated her for leaving, and I loved her for staying as long as she could. And I would never wish this pain on anyone.

I get it, he's hot. He probably gives you the best sex of your life. But if it doesn't fill you with tinglies to be around him every second you're around him—if he doesn't make you happy—then what the hell are you doing? You only live once," I said, because if I'd learned anything about living in a time-travelling apartment, no matter how much time you get, it's still never enough. And I wanted to start living my life like I was enjoying every moment that I had it. "And if you do it right," I said, remembering the way my aunt laughed as we sprinted to catch our connecting flights across the airport, how she flung her arms wide at the top of Arthur's Seat and the Parthenon and Santorini and every hill with a beautiful view she came across, as if she wanted to embrace the sky; the way she took her time to decide what she wanted on a menu; the way she asked everyone she met for their stories, absorbed their fairy tales, and chased the moon. "If you do it right," I repeated, "once is all you need.

Sunday morning dawned bright and cloudless. Ernest awoke early as always. He put on the red "Emporor's robe" and padded softly down the carpeted stairway. The early sunlight lay in pools on the living room floor. He had noticed that the guns were locked up in the basement. But the keys, as he well knew, were on the window ledge above the kitchen sink. He tiptoed down the basement stairs and unlocked the storage room. It smelled as dank as a grave. He chose a double-barreled Boss shotgun with a tight choke. He had used it for years of pigeon shooting. He took some shells from one of the boxes in the storage room, closed and locked the door, and climbed the basement stairs. If he saw the bright day outside, it did not deter him. He crossed the living room to the front foyer, a shrinelike entryway five by seven feet, with oak-paneled walls and a floor of linoleum tile. He had held for years to the maxim: "il faut (d'abord) durer". Now it had been succeeded by another: "il faut (apres tout) mourir". The idea, if not the phrase, filled all his mind. He slipped in two shells, lowered the gun butt carefully to the floor, leaned forward, pressed the twin barrels against his forehead just above the eyebrows, and tripped both triggers.