The Stars are on Our Side

by Jennifer Hartmann

But I’m a patient soldier, and I’ll wait. I’ll wait until she’s ready to see me for who I am, instead of as the man who is replacing her long-lost love.

Life is too short to waste precious time on people who don’t appreciate and value you—family or not.

“Children start walking at their own pace, too,” she muses, eyes still aimed high. “It doesn’t matter if it’s at eight months or eighteen months, even though people like to tell you that something is wrong. They’ll say your child is falling behind if the process doesn’t line up with their own ideal timeline.” She tilts her head to the side, a silver earring glinting in a sunbeam. “Then, suddenly, those babies are all grown up, running and chasing and thriving, and you realize you hardly remember them ever crawling. All you see is how far they’ve come.”

That’s really what it’s all about, isn’t it? Living. Truly living. That’s what love is. It’s finding that perfectly imperfect person that complements your heart, that brightens your shadows, that sees your broken, mismatched parts and wants to spend the rest of their life piecing them into place. And even if those pieces never fully fit, they love you anyway. They love you more. And I think we forget sometimes, the whole point of it all. We forget the beauty of living while we’re still alive. And there is no better way to live than to love.

“His life isn’t defined by anything that can fit into a duffel bag. And he’s always been like that. Gabe is the exact opposite of his father in every way.”