I didn’t want to make the same mistake my parents made. I didn’t want my love to fade away one day like an old scar. I wanted it to burn forever.
But I had loved him. I loved him longer and truer than I had anyone in my whole life and I would probably never love anyone that way again. Which to be honest was almost a relief.
Don’t marry him. Don’t be with him. Be with me.
I love Conrad and I probably always would. I would spend my whole life loving him one way or another. Maybe I would get married, maybe I would have a family, but it wouldn’t matter, because a piece of my heart, the piece where summer lived, would always be Conrad’s.
I knew I had to be careful. I had to keep my distance. If she knew how much I still cared, it was all over. I wouldn’t be able to walk away again. The first time was hard enough.
You’d rather make up fantasy version of somebody in your head than be with a real person.
For me, it was almost like winter didn’t count. Summer was what mattered. My whole life was measured in summers.
I hated him more than anything. I loved him more than anything. Because, he was everything. And I hated that, too.
It was a summer I would never, ever forget. It was the summer everything began. It was the summer I turned pretty. Because for the first time, I felt it. Pretty, I mean. Every summer up to this one, I believed it’d be different. Life would be different. And that summer, it finally was.
Love is scary: it changes; it can go away. That’s the part of the risk. I don’t want to be scared anymore.
It’s all relative, I suppose. You think you know love, you think you know real pain, but you don’t. You don’t know anything.
My two great loves. I think I always knew I would be Belly Fisher one day. I just didn’t know it was going to happen like this.
I go wherever you go,? he says, launching us into the water. This is our start. This is the moment it becomes real. We are married. We are infinite. Me and Conrad. The first boy I ever slow danced with, ever cried over. Ever loved.
You Are The Milk To My Shake, forever and ever. Love, J.
I stared at him. Did he really say that? Did he remember? The way he looked back at me, one eyebrow raised, I knew he did. And this time, I was the one to look away. Because I remembered. I remembered everything.
I don’t just want a part of you. I want all of you Jeremiah Fisher.
Lying here and looking up at the stars like this, it makes me feel like I’m lying on a planet. It’s so wide. So infinite -Belly Conklin.
You only like guys you don’t have a chance with, because you’re scared.
When a person you love dies, it doesn’t feel real. It’s like it’s happening to someone else. It’s someone else’s life. I’ve never been good with the abstract. What does it mean when someone is really truly gone?
I would rather have had someone shoot me in the head with a nail gun, repeatedly, than have to watch the two of them cuddling on the couch together all night. – Conrad.