it’s time to let your hair down, and give yourself permission
kindness boomerang
if so, be free! if not, leave him for me….
it will all get better now. at least that’s what they say. but i don’t see it coming
tôi hăm tư và trắng-tay
10 years from now
My Sister's Keeper, Jodi Picoult
It gets quiet for a moment, so all I can hear is the squelch of the windshield wipers. I slip my hands under my thighs, sit on them. “What you said at the trial… do you really think I’ll be amazing in ten years?”
“Why, Anna Fitzgerald, are you fishing for compliments?”
“Forget I said anything.”
He glances at me. “Yes, I do. I imagine you’ll be breaking guy’s hearts, or painting in Montmartre, or flying fighter jets, or hiking through undiscovered countries.” He pauses. “Maybe all of the above.”
There was a time when, like Kate, I’d wanted to be a ballerina. But since then I’ve gone through a thousand different stages: I wanted to be an astronaut. I wanted to be a paleontologist. I wanted to be a backup singer for Aretha Franklin, a member of the Cabinet, a Yellowstone National Park ranger. Now, based on the day, I sometimes want to be a microsurgeon, a poet, a ghost hunter.
Only one thing’s a constant. “Ten years from now,” I say, “I’d like to be Kate’s sister.”
My Sister’s Keeper, Jodi Picoult
what age are you when you’re in heaven?
Here’s my question: What age are you when you’re in Heaven? I mean, if it’s Heaven, you should be at your beauty-queen best, and I doubt that all the people who die of old age are wandering around toothless and bald. It opens up a whole additional realm of questions, too. If you hang yourself, do you walk around all gross and blue, with your tongue spitting out of your mouth? If you are killed in a war, do you spend eternity minus the leg that got blown up by a mine?
I figure that maybe you get a choice. You fill out the application form that asks you if you want a star view or a cloud view, if you like chicken or fish or manna for dinner, what age you’d like to be seen as by everyone else. Like me, for example, I might pick seventeen, in the hopes I grow boobs by then, and even if I’m a pruny centegenarian by the time I die, in Heaven I’d be young and pretty.
Once at a dinner party I heard my father say that even though he was old old old, in his heart he was twenty-one. So maybe there is a place in your life you wear out like a rut, or even better, like the soft spot on the couch. And no matter what else happens to you, you come back to that.
The problem, I suppose, is that everyone’s different. What happens in Heaven when all these people are trying to find each other after so many years spent apart? Say that you die and start looking around for your husband, who died five years ago. What if you’re picturing him at seventy, but he hit his groove at sixteen and is wandering around suave as can be?
Or what if you’re Kate, and you die at sixteen, but in Heaven you choose to look thirty-five, an age you never got to be here on Earth. How would anyone ever be able to find you?
.
My Sister’s Keeper, Jodi Picoult
i’m sure i’m worth a lot more dead than alive
It would solve a thousand problems if I rolled the Jeep over an embankment. It’s not like I haven’t thought about it, you know. On my licence, it says I’m an organ donor, but the truth is I’d consider being an organ martyr. I’m sure I’m worth a lot more dead than alive – the sum of the parts equals more than the whole. I wonder who might wind up walking around with my liver, my lungs, even my eyeballs. I wonder what poor asshole would get stuck with whatever it is in me that passes for a heart.
My Sister’s Keeper, Jodi Picoult
shadowed sidewalk
.
webb bridge. melbourne.
28 aug 11.
