“It is hard not to imagine my father’s body feeding the trees, the trees, in turn, feeding the cicadas, the cicadas’ bodies feeding the birds, my father’s body taking flight.““My children became at once great obstacles to fulfilling my personal longings and, at the same time, opened in me an abscess of new desire, painful and consuming: Let me keep them. Let them live.” “I won’t downplay the mystical. There is a scientific explanation for what I saw, a phenomenon called total internal reflection, but I’d looked through my bedroom window at the moon a thousand times, and it had never before been divided into two.”“Over all of those years, they reached toward each other with everything that ached; they grew bark.”“Even now, in my middle years, on the days when I struggle to walk through my life, I look to you to remind me that in the stories of our lives, we are all forging paths into the depths—of the water, of the wood—and the beasts will ever lie in wait.”“When I hear you cry, I worry I have opened a door in you that you may never close, but remind myself, as your brother’s head lolls back, that you are not me. You may never feel so alone. If you do, it will be because you are human, not because you are my daughter.”
Monica Judge 