There were so many people, so much to navigate, and as the distance fluctuated between us his hand kept slipping, down my arm to my wrist. And maybe he was going to let go as people pressed in on all sides, but all I could think was how when nothing made sense and hadn’t for ages, you just have to grab onto anything you feel sure of. So as I felt his fingers loosening around my wrist, I just wrapped my own around them, right, and held on.
What you do in your dreams is never your choice. But it made me happy anyway.
In any moment, there were so many chances for paths to cross and people to clash, come together, or do any number of things in between. It was amazing we could live at all, knowing all that could occur purely by chance. But what was the alternative?
I don’t believe in failure,” she was saying in that confident, breezy way. “Because simply by saying you’ve failed, you’ve admitted you attempted. And anyone who attempts is not a failure. Those who truly fail in my eyes are the ones who never try at all. The ones who sit on the couch and whine and moan and wait for the world to change for them.” – Kiki Sparks.
I stood there for a moment, studying each of us, taking in Kirstens’s smile, Whitney’s haunting gaze, the way my mother cocked her head slightly to the side. When I got to my own face, I found myself staring at it, so bright, with dark all around it, like it was someone I didn’t recognize. Like a word on a page that you’ve printed and read a million times, that suddenly looks strange or wrong, foreign, and you feel scared for a second, like you’ve lost something, even if you’re not sure what it is.
You stop believing in wishes when the only one you want to make can never come true.
Life is big and huge and scary. But you have to go and take your part of it. There’s a reason the saying is ‘Seize the day,’ not ‘Wait for it to come along at some point.
Like no longer having something could be a good thing, and the proof of it as well. I was used to the opposite, when absence equaled heartbreak.
You can’t measure love by time put in, but the weight of those moments. Some in life are light, like a touch. Others, you can’t help but stagger beneath.
I was in shock. Funny how the world works. You don’t get the something you really covet, but then the universe provides unexpected compensation. Here I thought you had to make a wish for it to come true.
You can make your life, or life can make you. Was it really that simple of a choice?
I don’t think anybody ever really knows what’s going to happen,” he said. “We’re all just out here hoping for the best.
We were there, together, and in the next room I could hear that monitor beeping. Keeping track of another heart’s beat and giving enduring, solid proof of our own.
Despite my dad’s assurances I was strangely nervous my stomach tight ever since we’d hung up. Maybe Deb had picked up on this and it was why she’d pretty much talked nonstop since I’d approached her and asked for a ride. I’d barely had time to explain the situation before she had launched into a dozen stories to illustrate the point that Things Happened But People Were Okay in the End.
For you, I wish for second chances.
A life isn’t just the pages you know, it’s everything.
So,” she went on, “it got me thinking about what cost beauty. Or for that matter, what cost anything? Would you trade love for beauty? Or happiness for beauty? Could a gorgeous person with a mean streak be a worthy trade? And if you did make the trade, decide you’d take that beautiful swan and hope it wouldn’t turn on you, what would you do if it did?
Sometimes forgetting was just as bad as remembering.
No matter where you are, home or the strangest of places, everyone wants to look like they know where they’re going.
There is always the rest of the story, right? Even if you don’t know right now what it is.