Reached (Matched, #3)

by Ally Condie

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

“My father also taught me that the earth is a giant stone,” she says. “Rolling and turning through the sky. And we’re all on it together. I do believe that.” “Why don’t we fall off?” I ask. “We couldn’t if we tried,” she says. “There’s something that holds us here.”

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.

We are always fighting against going quiet, going gentle.

He tied the red garden day like a flag to my memory, the way Ky and I used to tie red strips of cloth to mark obstacles on the Hill.

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.