The Forgotten Hours

She’d started to understand there was a chasm between how people saw their lives, how they wanted others to see them, and how they really were. A chasm that was too deep and dark to explore.

It turns out that no one believes her anyway, and that lack of belief in her festers, infects her through and through—because, in her heart, she wants to be an honest person, and she thought she was. But she is not fully honest with anyone, not even with herself. It turns out she cannot give voice to uncertainty; this is not allowed. She does not need to be told this to know it is true. So she becomes quiet; she continues her journey inward, a journey she will be on for years, alone, unable to share with anyone, not her family, not her friends, not her lover.

But she had not been tempted to look him up back then. She’d become accustomed to the sense of herself as separate from all others, and there was something comforting about that. It was best to keep the past just out of reach, hovering a little more than arm’s length away. While she knew it was there, could sense it, she carefully kept those memories out of her grasp, and she sometimes seemed to forget the past entirely. But that was an illusion. Her memories of Jack, of Lulu—of life before—were not actually gone and forgotten; they lived on inside her, shadows of a bleached-out stain.

feelings were not facts, memories lied, and people were not who you thought they were.

She understood then that she was truly alone inside herself, as were all human beings on earth.

Everything we choose to do has consequences. And people do not change unless they want to change. They show us their colors; we just don’t see them.

Too often, people who suffered trauma let themselves be defined by it, and she has been determined to avoid that fate.

Silence isn’t always empty, is it?

You could never truly be objective or dispassionate; your biases would always drive the way you saw reality and expressed facts.

People thought whatever they thought. There was no changing people’s minds now.