Reached (Matched, #3)

by Ally Condie

And it strikes me that this is how writing anything is, really. A collaboration between you who give the words and they who take them and find meaning in them, or put music behind them, or turn them aside because they were not what was needed.

You cannot change your journey if you are unwilling to move at all.

The earth reflects the sky and the sky meets the earth and, every now and then, if we’re lucky, we have a moment to see how small we are.

If you let hope inside, it takes you over. It feeds on your insides and uses your bones to climb and grow. Eventually it becomes the thing that is your bones, that holds you together. Holds you up until you don’t know how to live without it anymore. To pull it out of you would kill you entirely.

I wish I could have one without the other, but that’s the problem with being alive. You don’t usually get to choose the measure of suffering or the degree of joy you have.

When we fall in love the first time, we don’t know anything. We risk a lot less than we do if we choose to love again. There is something extraordinary about the first time falling. But it feels even better to find myself standing on solid ground, with someone holding on to me, pulling me back, and know that I’m doing the same for her.

Writing, painting, singing—it cannot stop everything. Cannot halt death in its tracks. But perhaps it can make the pause between death’s footsteps sound and look and feel beautiful, can make the space of waiting a place where you can linger without as much fear.

For we are all walking each other to our deaths, and the journey there between footsteps makes up our lives.