”Julie has been in the house for a few weeks, and though I am getting used to it, it still feels like someone has rubbed me all over with a rasp. Every pore seems to be open, every hair a fine filament ready to shoot me full of sensation at the slightest breeze. I have been fighting for so long to stifle sensation. I remember when the grief was so potent I would lie on the sofa with the television on drinking vodka gimlets, one after the other, just waiting to pass out, staying as still as possible, teaching myself the art of numbness. And now it is as if I’ve been dropped into scalding water and the numbness has peeled away and the skin underneath is affronted by air. If there is something missing — if I am afraid to love her quite as much as before – it is only because the potential for love feels so big and so intense that I fear I will disappear in the expression of it, that it will blow my skin away like clouds and I will be nothing.”
-
“I keep trying to find the
before. But once something like that happens to you, there is no
before anymore. It takes the
before away. And if there is no
before, then there’s no order I can tell it in that makes any sense, and no reason to choose one particular place over any other. I’d start with the shame, but everything gets there eventually. So, no hurry, I guess.”
-
“It was the first time I understood that there was a whole world in there I would never see, a world so distant from me, and so distinct, that to say that Julie was made from me, that she was my daughter and I was her mother, seemed meaningless. I think I loved her more profoundly in that moment than I have ever loved anyone.”
- Excerpts from
Good As Gone, by Amy Gentry
