Vikki Wakefield

“Maybe family were the people who came looking for you when you were lost.”

“Joe might have called that place godforsaken but I could see a whole lot of proof that if there was a God, He’d been there.”

“I told her about the best and the worst. The slow and sleepy places where weekdays rolled past like weekends and Mondays didn’t matter. Battered shacks perched on cliffs overlooking the endless, rumpled sea. Afternoons spent waiting on the docks, swinging my legs off a pier until boats rolled in with crates full of oysters and crayfish still gasping. Pulling fishhooks out of my feet because I never wore shoes, playing with other kids whose names I never knew. Those were the unforgettable summers. There were outback towns where you couldn’t see the roads for red dust, grids of streets with wandering dogs and children who ran wild and swam naked in creeks. I remembered climbing ancient trees that had a heartbeat if you pressed your ear to them. Boomboom-boomboom. Dreamy nights sleeping by the campfire and waking up covered in fine ash, as if I’d slept through a nuclear holocaust. We were wanderers, always with our faces to the sun.”

“It takes time to believe again”

“Some kinds of crazy you make for yourself, others you inherit”

“Sometimes we keep the physical objects until memory is enough”

“I thought about loneliness. How its not something you catch and mostly we choose it. How a trouble shared is a trouble halved but things like love and joy are multiplied when you have someone to share them with.”

“Where you've been isn't as important as where you're headed”

“I wanted to live, to take the open road before me.”

“Throw stones, make waves. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

“So you're all alone. And, for a short while, at least until it sinks in, you can fake anything.”

“Some things aren't meant for this world. They're too fragile, and life breaks them.”

“Maybe that was the thing about beginnings - they always seemed better than middles or endings. And if only I ever had beginnings and my past was so perfect, then the future would never measure up. I didn't want to live like that.”

“Sometimes the best you can do is try not to be one of the bastards”

“This is what you wanted, I told myself. To be alone. To keep moving.”

“Wrong turns just added more to who you are.”

“There comes a time when you decide you're done playing the victim. It just came a bit sooner for me.”

“Why did everyone have to be so goddamn needy?”

“I was hard-wired to run when I cared too much”

“I am nothing. I feel like nothing. I want my life to matter. What if one day I'm gone and nobody ever knew I existed?”

“Forever chasing stars”

“Recollection hurt so much; I could barely remember my unbroken self”

“We were wanderers, always with our faces to the sun.”

“You can't always make good choices. Sometimes you have to settle for making a choice you can live with.”

“Beginnings were always exciting.”

“I am afraid. I'm afraid of everything. I'm afraid of the dark, of closed-in spaces, of being alone and of getting too close. I'm afraid that I'll never again have the life I've always known, my feet in the dust and my heart full. I'm afraid of being alive; I'm afraid to die.”

“Life is full of wrong turns and dead ends and pathways that peter out”

“They all count, even the wrong turns; they all add more to who you become. Nobody wants to be a one-way street. There are signposts if you cared to look.”

“We craved new beginnings”

“Life was short, and if it wasn't sweet you were in the wrong place with the wrong people”

“I was the sum of two people, one dead, the other unknown.”

“You're so focused on steering without crashing that you never say the things you want to say”

“The way I see it, you have two options. Run, run like hell, or dive in”

“Who, being love, is poor? Oscar Wilde”

“When you're a child, what you see and hear and comprehend can be sorted into little boxes. Then, as you live and learn, all those boxes open up and become rooms. The more you experience, the bigger those rooms get. If you're lucky enough, there are some people you will love, and who will love you, long enough to see their boxes grow into vast spaces. You'll understand things that had no meaning. You'll find dark corners that only light up for the briefest moments. But when you keep getting lost, you just end up with a pile of boxes.”

“I know that this is as close as I'll ever get. He's broken in ways I'm not.”

“A text message has no soul, no matter how many commas you shift.”