I wondered if emotions were like menstrual cycles, if you get enough women together. Give it time, and everyone was crying.
Maybe we were all destined to just keep doing the same stupid things, over and over again, never really learning a single thing.
Just because we don’t see eye to eye on everything doesn’t mean we can’t be close.
That first love. And the first one who breaks your heart. For me, they just happen to be the same person.
She stroked my hair and told me I was beautiful, but I was old enough by then to know not to believe it anymore.
You’re not the kind of person who smiles for nothing, Colie. I have to earn every one.
I don’t think anyone would think that an ellipsis represents doubt or anything. I think it’s more, you know, hinting at the future. What lies ahead.
You didn’t fail. You just opted out. There’s a difference.
Get back on that bike.
You asked me to go out with you. I know you probably changed your mind. But you should know, the answer was yes. It’s always been yes when it comes to you.
I mean, it’s impossible to fake anything if you’ve already seen the other person in a way they’d never choose for you to. You can’t go back from that.
I felt like I’d been swimming so hard, and the water growing warmer and warmer the closer I got to the top. I wasn’t there yet, but now I could see the surface, rippling just beyond my fingers.
Here was a boy who liked flaws, who saw them not as failings but as strengths. Who knew such a person could exist, or what would have happened if we’d found each other under different circumstances? Maybe in a perfect world. But not in this one.
She was just a shell of her former self, functioning and talking but hardly alive.
But anyone can begin. It was the part with all the promise, the potential, the things I loved. More and more, though, I was finding myself wanting to find out what happened in the end...
It was like when you ripped a piece of paper into two: no matter how you tried, the seams never fit exactly right again.
Because it is so hard, in any life, to believe in what you can’t fully understand.
Some people, they can’t just move on, you know, mourn and cry and be done with it. Or at least seem to be. But for me... I don’t know. I didn’t want to fix it, to forget. It wasn’t something that was broken. It’s just... something that happened. And like that hole, I’m just finding ways, every day, of working around it. Respecting and remembering and getting on at the same time.
She knew I could tell with one glance, one look, one simple instant. It was her eyes. Despite the thick makeup, they were still dark-rimmed., haunted, and sad. Most of all though, they were familiar. The fact that we were in front of hundreds of strangers changed nothing at all. I’d spent a summer with those same eyes-scared, lost, confused-staring back at me. I would have known them anywhere.
You only really fall apart in front of the people you know can piece you back together.