Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone

 “Looking back, having been through trauma again as an adult… I can see another side to my mother’s actions back then. Because now I know that in the months after something so devastating, everything feels like sleepwalking. Life becomes a stuporous fulfillment of routine, where even walking to the supermarket feels like you’re dragging your limbs through air as heavy as the drying room’s. Every basic task starts to feel like a decision, and that becomes so draining that you end up unable to make any of them.”

Flat Share by Beth O’Leary

 “We all descend into the kind of silence that comes after you’ve talked about something difficult, half grateful for it being over, half relieved to have managed it at all.”