The Truth About Forever

by Sarah Dessen

All I’d wanted for so long was for someone to explain everything that had happened to me in this same way. To label it neatly on a page: this leads to this leads to this. I knew, deep down, it was more complicated than that,

You have to have a little bit of disorganization now and then. Otherwise, you’ll never really enjoy it when things go right.

‘Some people,’ she said, and I wasn’t even sure she’d heard me, ‘they can 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.

If your forever was ending tomorrow, would this be how you’d want to have spent it?’

It was weird, I thought, how much you could have in common with someone and, from a distance, never even know it.

I was not a girl with all the information, but I knew one thing. If this was my forever, I didn’t want to spend another second of it here.

Forever was so many different things. It was always changing; it was what everything was really all about. It was twenty minutes, or a hundred years, or just this instant, or any instant I wished would last and last. But there was only one truth about forever that really mattered, and that was this: it was happening. Right then, as I ran with Wes into that bright sun, and every moment afterwards. Look, there. Now. Now. Now.