My Sisters Keeper

   Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it's not because they enjoy solitude. It's because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them. 


   Seeing her sitting there unresponsive makes me realize that silence has a sound. 


   Do you know how sometimes - when you are riding your bike and you start skidding across sand, or when you miss a step and start tumbling down the stairs - you have those long, long seconds to know that you are going to be hurt, and badly? 


   I wondered what happened when you offered yourself to someone, and they opened you, only to discover you were not the gift they expected and they had to smile and nod and say thank you all the same.

   It's disappointing to know that someone can see right through you. 


   It's about a girl who is on the cusp of becoming someone.. A girl who may not know what she wants right now, and she may not know who she is right now, but who deserves the chance to find out. 


   Sometimes to get what you want the most, you have to do what you want the least. 


   It doesn't take a whole long life to realize that what we deserve to have, we rarely get. 


   See, as much as you want to hold on to the bitter sore memory that someone has left this world, you are still in it.


   I learn from my own daughter that you don't have to be awake to cry. 


   You know how every now and then, you have a moment where your whole life stretches out ahead of you like a forked road, and even as you choose one gritty path you've got your eyes on the other the whole time, certain that you're making a mistake. 


   You don't love someone because they're perfect, you love them in spite of the fact that they're not. 


   Maybe who we are isn't so much about what we do, but rather what we're capable of when we least expect it. 


   There are always sides. There is always a winner and a loser. For every person who gets, there's someone who must give.  


   There should be a statute of limitation on grief. A rulebook that says it is all right to wake up crying, but only for a month. That after 42 days you will no longer turn with your heart racing, certain you have heard her call out your name. That there will be no fine imposed if you feel the need to clean out her desk; take down her artwork from the refrigerator; turn over a school portrait as you pass - if only because it cuts you fresh again to see it. That it's okay to measure the time she has been gone, the way we once measured her birthdays.


   There are some things we do because we convince ourselves it would be better for everyone involved.  We tell ourselves that it's the right thing to do, the altruistic thing to do.  It's far easier than telling ourselves the truth. 


   Kids think with their brains cracked wide open; becoming an adult, I've decided, is only a slow sewing shut.  


   And the very act of living is a tide; at first it seems to make no difference at all, and then one day you look down and see how much pain has eroded.


   I sometimes wonder if it is just me, or if there are other women who figure out where they are supposed to be by going nowhere. 


   In the English language there are orphans and widows, but there is no word for the parents who loses a child. 


   He smiles at me, and I am suddenly seventeen again - the year I realize that love doesn't follow the rules, the year I understood that nothing is worth having so much as something unattainable.


   I ...understand how a parent might hit a child- it's because you can look into their eyes and see a reflection of yourself that you wish you hadn't. 


   It is a remarkable question- Do all the wonderful things happen when we are not aware of them? 


   The bottom line is that we never fall for the people we're supposed to.


   Lately, I have been having nightmares, where I'm cut into so many pieces that there isn't enough of me to be put back together. 


   Until this moment, I had not realized that someone could break your heart twice, along the very same fault lines.


   A photo says, you were happy, and I wanted to catch that. A photo says, you were so important to me that I put down everything else to come watch. 


   Once you had put the pieces back together, even though you may look intact, you were never quite the same as you'd been before the fall. 
   
   Love is not an equation, it is not a contract, and it is not a happy ending. Love is the slate under the chalk, the ground that buildings rise, and the oxygen in the air. It is the place you come back to, no matter where your headed.


   I didn't want to see her because it would make me feel better. I came because without her, it's hard to remember who I am... 


   Life was what happened when all the what-ifs didn't, when what you dreamed or hoped or in this case feared might come to pass passed by instead.  


   If you ask me, music is the language of memory.


   Everyone thinks you make mistakes when you're young. But I don't think we make any fewer when we're grown up.


   Dylan Jerome," the lawyer admits, "wanted to sue God for not caring enough about him.


   I do know that there are some things, though, that occur without a direct line of antecedents. 


   If you have a sister and she dies, do you stop saying you have one? Or are you always a sister, even when the other half of the equation is gone? 


   I have only known her for two years. But if you took every memory, every moment, if you stretched them end to end-they'd reach forever. 


   Remember that every fire will burn itself out, even without your help. 


   The human capacity for burden is like bamboo- far more flexible than you'd ever believe at first glance. 


   There are just as many stories to be told in the dark spots s there are in the bright ones. 


   I had the heart of the relationship, and no body to grow it in... It broke.  


   Do you fix a wheel that isn't broken, or do you wait until the cart collapses? 


   Life isn't nearly as stable as we want it to be. 


   Once you sign on to be a mother, that's the only shift they offer. 


   Time is an optical illusion- never quite as solid or strong as we think it is.


   Parenting is really just a matter of tracking, of hoping your kids do not get so far ahead you can no longer see their next moves.  


   "You are so brave," I tell her, and then I smile. "When I grow up, I want to be just like you."
To my surprise, Kate shakes her head hard. Her voice is a feather, a thread. 
"No Mommy," she says. "You'd be sick."


   There's some illogical part of me hat still believes if you want Superman to show up, first there's got to be someone worth saving. 


   On the surface, we're polar opposites.  Under the skin, though, we're the same:  people think they know what they're getting, and they're always wrong. 


   But I didn't frame it; I put into an envelope and sealed it and stuffed it far back into a corner drawer of a filing cabinet. It's there, just in case one of these days I start to lose her.
There might be a morning when I wake up and her face isn't the first thing I see. Or a lazy August afternoon when I can't quite recall anymore where the freckles were on her right shoulders. Maybe one of these days, I will not be able to listen to the sound of snow falling and hear her footsteps. 


   A girl who is thirteen-which is hard, and difficult, and beautiful, and painful, and exhilarating. 


   There is a curious thing that happens with the passage of time: a calcification of character. 


   I realize then that we never have children, we receive them. 


   And sometimes it's not for quite as long as we would have expected or hoped. But it is still far better than never having had those children at all.


   It's like picking up an unfamiliar piece of sheet music & starting to stumble through it, only to realize it is a melody you'd once learned by heart, one you can play without even trying. 


   Love has all the lasting permanence of a rainbow - beautiful while it's there, and just as likely to have disappeared by the time you blink. 


   A fire can't burn forever. Eventually, it consumes itself. 


   I don't want to make the same mistake twice. I don't  want to tell myself it's over when it's not. 


   No matter who you are, there is some part of you that always wishes you were someone else. 


   Life sometimes gets so bogged down in the details, you forget you are living it. There is always another appointment to be met, another bill to pay, another symptom presenting, another uneventful day to be notched onto the wooden wall. We have synchronized our watches, studied our calendars, existed in minutes, and completely forgotten to step back and see what we've accomplished. 


   Change isn't always for the worst; the shell that forms around a piece of sand looks to some people like an irritation, and to others, like a pearl. 


   Listen, I would say, this is not how I thought our lives would go and may be we cannot find our way out of this alley. But there is no one I'd rather be lost with. 


   I used to think I'd be just like them when I grew up, but I am not. And the thing is, somewhere along the way, I stopped wanting to be like them, anyway. 


   It's hard to be the one always waiting. I mean, there's something to be said for the hero who charges off to battle, but when you get right down to it there's a whole story in who's left behind. 


   I can't answer a single one of these, which is how I know that whether I'm ready or not, I'm growing up. 


   See, I get a round, hollow spot in my belly knowing I could tell him what's coming, but also knowing it would come out sounding like a warning. 


   May be there are entire worlds where there are no fences, where feeling bears you like a tide. 


   I have never understood why it is called losing a child. No parent is that careless. We all know exactly where our sons and daughters are; we just don't necessarily want them to be there.


    Nowadays, I don't have expectations, and this way she beats them all. 


   I used to pretend that I was just passing through this family on my way to my real one. 


   I look for places like me: big, hollow, forgotten by most everyone. 


   Is it because they are so comfortable, they already know what the other is thinking? Or is it because after a certain point, there is simply nothing left to say? 


   Extraordinary things are always hiding in places people never think to look. 


   "I remember everything Campbell," she interrupts. "If I didn't, this wouldn't be so hard."


   It feels like we are sitting on the tight bench of a bus with a stranger between us, one that neither of us is willing to admit or mention, and so we find ourselves talking around him and through him and sneaking glances when the other one isn't looking. 


   Her hair is longer now, and fine lines bracket her mouth, parentheses around a lifetime of words I was not around to hear. 


   In my family, we seem to have a tortured history of not saying what we ought to and not meaning what we do. 


   This is when I realize that Anna has already left the table, and more importantly, that nobody noticed. 


   It is so easy to presume that while your own world has ground to an absolute halt, so has everyone else's. 


   There is nothing worse than silence, strung like heavy beads on too delicate a conversation. 


   What I want, more than anything, is to turn back time a little. To become the kid I used to be, who believed whatever my mother said was one hundred percent true and right without looking hard enough to see the hairline crack. 


   Following my mother's footsteps was the surest way out. 


   It is the things you cannot see coming that are strong enough to kill you. 


   Shooting stars are not stars at all. They re just rocks that enter the atmosphere and catch fire under friction. What we wish on  when we see one  is only a trail of debris. 


   Dark matter has a gravitation effect on other objects. You can't see it, you can't feel it, but you can watch something being pulled in its direction.