Rhian J. Martin

Traveling, she realized, was like a slow dismemberment of the body. It plucked the heart out of her and split it into pieces, leaving a bit behind wherever she went, never to be whole again.

The benefit of carrying the entire world on your shoulders was that you didn__ have to stare it in the face.

She supposed this was the real definition of a mother _ a woman who willingly allows her heart to break over and over again for her children.

What a man loves may be his ruin, but what a man ruins he can never truly love.

There was a certain untamed energy about the west of Ireland _ full of tragedy and struggle, sown with the flesh of the departed.

Time limits tend to turn everything predictable and mundane into a novelty.

Such was the cyclical nature of Galway life: finding tragedy in the simple things and simplicity in the tragic things.

People are like mussels. You can put them in a vat of boiling water, and some of them will pop open immediately. Some of them will have to float around in the water for a bit, then they__l slowly release. Others never open up at all, no matter what sort of hot water they__e in.

It was all very isolating to think about, what people use to define themselves and their actions. And at the end of the day, did it make people feel better? Maybe it did. Maybe it gave them something to grasp at in the ambiguous vein of life on Earth.

Are guilt and regret not messages from inside of us, letting us know that our moral compasses have been recalibrated and are pointing in the right direction?