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.
All I’d ever thought I wanted was to be left alone. Until I was.
After loving someone you couldn’t depend on, you realize how important it is to trust someone will do what they say. It’s such a simple thing, not to promise what you can’t or won’t deliver. But my mom had done that all the time.
As I stepped out to face myself in the mirror, reaching a hand to smooth away the steam, I saw myself differently. It was as if I had grown again as I slept, but this time just to fit my own size. As if my soul had expanded, filling out the gaps of the height that had burdened me all these months. Like a balloon filling slowly with air, becoming all smooth and buoyant, I felt like I finally fit within myself, edge to edge, every crevice filled.
I knew whatever I said right then she wouldn’t hear; with that kind of pain, a deafness comes.