Total pages in book: 63
Estimated words: 59947 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 300(@200wpm)___ 240(@250wpm)___ 200(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 59947 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 300(@200wpm)___ 240(@250wpm)___ 200(@300wpm)
And the thing is, I understand a lot of it. The world is shitty in so many ways. I understand the anger, the discontent.
But there are also so many people who can’t push back against the shit. Because they don’t have time or money; or they don’t have the spoons, emotionally and mentally and physically. So they can’t devote themselves toward changing things. But Lauryn could.
She just doesn’t. And I’ve judged her for it…but I’ve never asked myself why she doesn’t. Not to excuse her, but to at least understand.
Until today, I’d forgotten how she’d been considered my dad’s kid, while I was my mom’s. And although I’ve always thought of us both as having been abandoned—by my dad leaving and my mom not making the effort—in a way, Lauryn was more abandoned than I was. My mom had her plans for me, and from Lauryn’s perspective, that must have seemed like positive attention. Perhaps it’s no wonder that Lauryn tries so hard to do what’s right and good. She might have been trying to gain a little bit of the attention my mom spent on me.
I don’t think she’s trying to get my mom’s attention now. That ship has sailed. But that doesn’t mean she didn’t learn some things from our mother—including the negativity and nitpicking. My mom is just more subtle about it.
But my mom also projects this image of (goody goody) perfection. She does everything for the right reasons. She tries to do what’s best for everyone else. She always sacrifices her own time and interests on behalf of a greater cause. And I can see Lauryn trying to do what’s right and to be perfect in her own way.
Doing right is one thing, however. Trying to be perfect is another. One of the first things I learned from my art instructors was that perfection is the enemy of progress. No piece would ever be finished if it had to be absolutely perfect. It would be an endless toil of trying and trying and trying, yet never reaching the goal.
Maybe that’s what happened to Lauryn. Maybe she’s paralyzed by the impossibility of being perfect. Maybe the pressure to do everything right means never taking a step for fear it might be the wrong one—as if there’s a pitfall waiting behind every shining door. And I suppose there is. Because nothing is ever completely, perfectly right.
Maybe she’s so worried about stepping wrong in her quest to do right, she’s lost sight of what truly matters—which is the people around her.
Then again, maybe that’s only what matters to me, not to Lauryn. I hope that’s not true. Because it’s what frustrates me most about her—feeling as if she completely forgets about people. Both the people who need help and the people who are helping. She’s so focused on pointing at all the wrong things in the world, it’s like she’s blind to the efforts people are making to right those wrongs. And when she’s not blind to the effort, she criticizes the effort because the results aren’t perfect (maybe another thing she learned from our mom, because we were never perfect and she let us know it.) Maybe that’s what makes me so angry with Lauryn now. To see so many people working, and trying, and doing their best, and to have her dismiss those effort as shit. As never good enough.
Because I’m also doing my best. Yet I’m never good enough for her. For my own sister. Who’s been where I’ve been, who has lived through much of the same shit as I have, the same grief and loss, who grew up with the same mom. Everything I do isn’t enough for the one person in the world who should understand me.
It’s also bewildering to realize…that one person in the world might actually be Reed Knowles.
Who will kiss me tomorrow. If I want him to.
But not just a kiss. I know that. Reed must, too. It wouldn’t ever stop at a kiss. Not with the two of us stuck in the cabin together. Not when there’s only one bed. Not when I keep thinking about his dick. Just kisses might last…a day? An hour?
Five fucking minutes?
It’s almost unfathomable that kissing him is even a question. A day ago—hell, only this morning—I wouldn’t have considered it. Not for a second.
Yet I see him so differently now. Even the worst thing I thought about him—the bulldozing of my mother’s house—seems a little more understandable after hearing that my mom spent years suing his dead mother. Honestly, I’m not sure there’s much difference between how awful our surviving parents are. They each wanted to destroy everything the other one had. Reed’s father just happened to be more successful. Though my mom didn’t make out too badly, either (except I’d bet anything that four hundred thousand isn’t as much as my mother thought she deserved, so she probably does feel that Knowles cheated her).