Ripe: A Novel

I step forward. For once, I do not waver. I look up into the familiar darkness. With the red fruit of my heart full in my throat, I give myself up.

The black hole draws closer, ever closer, the darkness blotting out the old world, offering another future, another path, offering either an ending or a beginning

Anything that can happen will happen. What we resist the most is eventually what must befall us. What we fight eventually becomes our future.

Hell, with its demons and flames and eternal torment. What is the sin?

But a man’s needs trumped a woman’s every time, I had learned that by then.

Here are the facts: this is called a boundary. A boundary hurts just as much as being stung by my mother. Love is just as painful as its absence.

Sometimes I miss my mother. Or maybe I miss the mother I didn’t have.

Looking back, it becomes
clear: you have to betray yourself first in order for anyone else to betray you.

You can convince yourself of anything and keep on pretending for as long as you live. That’s how a belief begins its evolution into faith. Faith is a belief in the unseen, a wholehearted hope that what you believe without proof is indeed true.

Life’s greater truth is like that, always there, waiting to slide its knife into the heart of our illusions.