The Seven Year Slip

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

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.

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

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

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

You could live somewhere your entire life and still find things to surprise you.

I loved how a book, a story, a set of words in a sentence organised in the exact right order, made you miss places you've never visited, and people you've never met.

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.

For all the food lovers out there who burn popcorn in the microwave:

we’d be too strong if we could cook,
too