But I know I would not go out. I had taken this time to fall in love instead — in love with the sort of helplessness I had not felt in death — the helplessness of being alive, the dark bright pity of being human — feeling as you went, groping in corners and opening your arms to light - all of it part of navigating the unknown.

You could not be filled with hate and be beautiful. Like any other girl, I wanted to be beautiful. But I was filled with hate.

His love for my mother wasn't about looking back and loving something that would never change. It was about loving my mother for everything -- for her brokenness and her fleeing, for her being there right then in that moment before the sun rose and the hospital staff came in. It was about touching that hair with the side of his fingertip, and knowing yet plumbing fearlessly the depths of her ocean eyes.

I forgive you," I said. I said what I had to. I would die by pieces to save myself from real death.

I missed her then but it was an odd sort of missing because by then, I knew the meaning of forever.

He had a moment of clarity about how life should be lived: not as a child or as a woman. They were the two worst things to be.

Nothing is ever certain.