Then, like a damn cracking, the grief poured out. I sank to the floor and cried so hard it felt like I was breaking myself in half. and still, I couldn't get my body to express the true fullness of my grief. I was the architect of my own misery. no amount of sobbing was equal to the pain.

You're the queen of walking on eggshells. That's why you've always been so quiet. But you're not walking on them with me. You feel safe enough to get mad.

It was amazing how embodied obedience was. Amazing how, even though sometimes I thought I hated my parents, their commandments still wormed their way so deep into my subconscious that obeying them was more muscle memory than choice. That had to be the worst kind of prison - the one whose bars were buried under your skin, invisible cages around your heart and mind.

But joys are few and far between in this life, so I can hardly bring myself to feel guilty.

Eventually the tall, skinny pines give way to a small clearing, and in the middle is a tree that towers above the others. It reaches out with a hundred snaking arms, some of them bent low to the ground. We call it the Medusa, because long ago, Everett and I decided we would give our love to villains. We know all too easy it is to become one when you're misunderstood. Our love is a corrective measure.

I wasn't my parents' kind of girl, not on the inside, but I wasn't anyone else's, either.

sometimes a person is more than a person. Sometimes they’re a lifeline. Your ticket out, not just of a house or a town but an invisible prison whose bars are in your mind. Sometimes they’re a key in the exact shape of the lock that cages you.

“We’ll explore during the day and read at night and—” “Be happy,”

The Bible talks endlessly about parental sacrifice: God sacrificing Jesus, Abraham sacrificing Isaac. Tests of love and devotion. But what about what children sacrifice? What about the courage it takes to right our parents’ wrongs, course correct the mess they’ve left us?

I finally understand the greatest pain of all. It’s the moment you realize the family who raised you—the people who witnessed you in every moment of tender vulnerability growing up, who saw your small scraped knees, your spilled tears, your young eyes wide in wonder—don’t love you back. At least not the same way. Your love is, and will always be, unrequited. Maybe I’d been a masochist for holding on to hope for so long, or maybe it was only human, the resilience of that tiny flicker in my heart. Either way, kneeling on the floor of their house, the flame is finally snuffed. Loneliness and despair wash over me.

this is what I wanted before I even had the language for it: the kind of love that can look at ugliness, complexity, the unvarnished truth, and not flinch. A love that peels back the layers. Forget God. This is the love that will save me.

“Why should we have to love and obey a world that doesn’t love us back?”

There are no heroic vampires or mystical swamp creatures. There’s not even a God or a Devil. They’re all fiction. There’s no one out there making sure everyone gets what they deserve. It’s just us.

Why did we fall in love like lit matches dropped in kerosene? The answer came to me easy as anything. And if I could’ve been honest with my mother, I would’ve said we loved like this, with an all-consuming passion, because our hearts had awakened to the truth of what we wanted for ourselves. The awakening itself was a miracle for those of us who had no map for love, who’d never once felt an emotion directed at ourselves as strong as the ones we gave to others. How do you draw a map of a place you’ve never been?

Love isn’t salvation; it’s a curse. Feeling so much, wanting so much, not being in control of yourself.

I knew he needed taking care of, escaping wasn’t a luxury I could afford.

I truly cannot tell which way is up or down, if I’m sinking to the ocean floor or floating to the moon, on my way to Heaven or Hell, if there is even any difference between them after all.

“Pain is how you know you’re alive, Ruth. It’s not something you should bury.”

my heart has always been hungry to love, so maybe it isn’t such a surprise

I wasn’t my parents’ kind of girl, not on the inside, but I wasn’t anyone else’s, either. So instead of friendships, I cultivated quiet rebellions