Quotes from Kristin Kimball

Meanwhile I was trying to stave off the ache I'd developed. I noticed it first at the airport, coming home from a trip. There was a crowd on the other side of customs, holding flowers, the little kids dressed up and excited, waiting for their loved ones, who were returning home. I hated walking past that gauntlet of waiting people, because none of them were waiting for me. I stood in the cab line and felt the weight of my aloneness come down on me.

I unlocked the door of my apartment, where the only movement, while I was gone, had been the light moving across the walls from the morning to evening and a scuttling roach or two, and the air inside smelled of loneliness. The ache got eased a little the next day, after I'd picked up my dog from my sister, gotten sucked back into the slipstream of the city. But only a little. And soon it spread, until the word home could make me cry. I wanted one.

My new life was marking me. It was happening so quickly. There were intermittent spells of resistance, during which I'd pluck and moisturize and exfoliate, and then there was a period of grieving for my old self, who seemed to be disappearing toward the horizon, and then I relaxed into it.

That's the thing about misfortune and grief: they have a lot of weight but no mass. You can't lift them on behalf of a friend. But at least you can bring food.

This humble wish seemed impossible. It was so different from the life I was living, and no one in my circle had those things, or wanted them, or would admit it if they did. I thought I could acknowledge the ache and learn to live with it, the way you live with the pain that lingers long after you've broken a bone, the kind that foretells a shift in the weather.

We didn't need a new house after all. When something isn't working, you don't always need to tear down the whole structure. Sometimes you just pull down a wall, reinvent, put some new skin on the old bones. And it's lovely.

vulnerability is necessary if you hope to find some grace.