I am frightened to discover my past. What I have achieved, and what I have not.

We’re wearing masks, all of us, all of the time. We’re presenting a face, a version of ourselves, to the world, to each other. We show a different face depending on who we’re with and what they expect of us. Even when we’re alone it’s just another mask, the version of ourselves we’d prefer to be.

I think of my sponsor. Rachel. “Addiction is a patient disease,” she said to me once. “It’ll wait for your whole life, if it has to. Never forget that.

We tell ourselves often enough that something happened, we start to believe it, and then we can actually remember it.

I guess sometimes it’s not so much about how long you’ve known someone, but about what you’ve been through together.

His grief is not new. It has had the time to bed down within him, to become part of his foundations, rather than something that rocks them.

The little things. Perhaps it is these trivialities I have been writing down in my book, these small hooks on which my whole life is hung.

Two wrongs don’t make anything right, but maybe they make things more equal.

These snatched moments. Kneeling in front of the closet or leaning on the bed. Writing. I am feverish. It floods out of me, almost without thought. Pages and pages. I am here again now, while Ben thinks I am resting. I cannot stop. I want to write down everything. I wonder if this is what it was like when I wrote my novel, this pouring onto the page. Or had that been slower, more considered? I wish I could remember.

Why did he feel that wanting to make sense of my fractured life meant that I wanted to change it in some way?