How wild it was, to let it be. - Cheryl Strayed

I would want things to be different than they were. The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods.

I put her burnt bones into my mouth and swallowed them whole.

"I've given you everything," she insisted again and again in her last days. "Yes," I agreed. She had, it was true. She did. She did. She'd come at us with maximum maternal velocity. She hadn't held back a thing, not a single lick of her love.