1.

“The paradox of pain is that it is only universal in retrospect. In the present, it is fiercely personal.”

2.

“Sometimes it’s not love that brings a woman back—it’s exhaustion. It’s loneliness.”

3.

“The music is a safe place to practice being human. In the span of one song I can feel it all, let it all come—joy and hope and terror and rage and love—and then let it pass. The song always ends. I survive every time. This is how I know I’m getting better: I become able to survive the beauty of music.”

4.

“I want to fall in grown-up love. I want risky, true, scary love. I want to learn how to let my body bring me to love with an equal partner. I want that.”

5.

“Maybe the pain won’t change, but I will.”

6.

“Pain transforms one woman into two so that she has someone to walk with, someone to sit with her in the dark when everyone else leaves. I am not alone. I have my hurt self, but I also have this representative of me.”

7.

“I don’t want to be trapped inside myself forever. I want to be in love.”

8.

“Grief is an eraser. I feel erased of everything but pain and fear.”

9.

“I’m afraid that if I ask any of these questions, if I try to say too many words, my hurt self will sneak out through my throat, start screaming, and never stop.”

10.

“Shock is a grace period. It gives a woman time to gather what she needs around her, before the exhaustion and panic set in like a heavy snow. Shock allows her time to circle her people so that she can enter the hard work of grief, which will require all of her. Shock is the window offered after the fall so a woman can prepare herself for winter.”

11.

“Maybe there is no way for love to fail, because the eventual result of all love is New Life.”

12.

“You can’t buy sexy, you have to become sexy through a lifetime of learning to love who God made you to be and learning who God made someone else to be.”

13.

“Love, Pain, Life: I am not afraid. I was born to do this.”

14.

“Grief is nothing but a painful waiting, a horrible patience. Grief cannot be torn down or scaled or overcome or outsmarted. It can only be outlasted.”

15.

“Maybe my reliance on numbing is keeping me from the two things I was born for: learning and loving.”

16.

“When I finish the telling, I want people to be as shocked and confused as I am. I want thunder to roll and mouths to drop open. But most often, the listener makes the pain harder for me by trying to make it easier for her.”

17.

“Love is not a victory march; it’s a cold and broken hallelujah.”

18.

“Now I wonder, is love not a feeling but a place between two present people? A sacred place created when two people decide it’s safe enough to let their real selves surface and touch each other? Is that why it’s called in love? Because you have to visit there?”

19.

“Maybe the cost of being a hoverer and a diver—someone who thinks about love and analyzes love and admires love from a distance—is that I cannot be in love. Because I don’t go there. I have stayed removed. I have somehow decided that if I’m not truly present, I can’t be hurt by people, but what if I can’t be loved by them either? What if my body is the only vessel I have that can bring me to love?”

20.

“We can choose to be perfect and admired or to be real and loved.”

21.

“I’ve never let myself trust love before because I’ve never let myself trust pain. What if pain—like love—is just a place brave people visit?”

22.

“When two people are sexy enough to be brave and kind with each other, that’s love.”