“Everything about the house was rich, and dense, and rooted. It was everything I wasn’t. Even the air, with its distinct smell of oak wood and sage, spoke to its identify and its history. I couldn’t help but feel small here. Overwhelmed. Incompatible.”
“There was something strange about hearing that word, like it didn’t belong to me anymore or shouldn’t be coming out of his mouth. Maybe it was because it made me face reality; that these past six months weren’t just some perpetual nightmare I was stuck in; that I wasn’t simply waiting for someone to wake me up and tell me none of it was real and that everything was fine.”
“It was hard to let go of that; to let go of the life I had before, but the truth was, it was harder for me to stay there inside the pain. I wasn’t strong enough to live there no matter how much I wanted to.”
“This was what my seventeen years of life had been reduced to: one duffel bag and a hideous valise. How ironic since I used to be the kind of girl who shopped every week-end and worried about what so and so thought about my outfit or if what’s his face noticed me that day.”
“I walked hand in hand with my enemy, allowed their kiss of death to linger on my lips while the world disintegrated around me. I couldn’t see through the smoke and mirrors; too consumed with fighting a destiny I didn’t want; too afraid to let go of a life I wasn’t meant to have.”
“At most, I could allow myself only a few minutes to cry for him—to grieve our lives, and then I had to push the memories away, burying them deep inside of me once again so that I could function. So that I could go on.”
“There was something about him—about those eyes and that stare—something familiar. It was the kind of something that made everyone else in the room fade away into the dark recess of my mind until there was no one left but me and him. He was the picture. Everything else around him was just white noise.”
“I used to cringe when people said I looked like him—my father, because I was a girl and girls aren’t supposed to look like their fathers. Girls are supposed to look like their mothers, or fairy princesses, or Barbie dolls, or some crap like that.”
“A calling implies I have a choice, doesn’t it? That I could answer the call, or not. That I have a choice in whether or not I accept this as my destiny? Well, I don’t. I don’t want anything to do with it. And I don’t accept the call. Matter of fact, this line is no longer in service. ”