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The moment Emma came into view, my entire world slipped into slow motion. My brain took a screenshot. I felt the moment freeze and save.
“Why not forgive? In a world where you can choose anger or empathy, always choose empathy, Justin.
Sometimes the best way to show love or be kind to someone is to meet them where they are.”
I think sometimes the key to happiness is framing those things in a different way.”
“How about we make a deal. If you ever ask me what I’m thinking, I’ll always tell you the truth.” She looked at me with a raised eyebrow. “What if it’s embarrassing?” “The truth isn’t supposed to be pretty, right? It’s the truth.”
“Unhealed trauma is a crack. And all the little hard things that trickle into it that would have rolled off someone else, settle. Then when life gets cold, that crack gets bigger, longer, deeper. It makes new breaks. You don’t know how broken she was or what she was trying to do to fill those cracks. Being broken is not an excuse for bad behavior, you still have to make good choices and do the right thing. But it can be the reason. And sometimes understanding the reason can be what helps you heal.”
“What if I mess them up?” I asked quietly. She smiled at me gently. “What if you save them?”
It’s funny how when you find someone you like as much as I liked her, the destination is suddenly wherever they are. Even if there’s someplace better, you wouldn’t go if they couldn’t come.
Not everything that comes out of crisis is bad. Sometimes your traumas are the reason you know how to help.
I felt like I could stay in this moment forever. Like it was timeless because of how absolutely perfect it was. And yet there was nothing perfect about it. Not in the traditional sense. We were in pajamas. We weren’t on a date, standing under the moon. We were next to a sink full of dirty dishes and a crusty waffle iron. There wasn’t music playing or candlelight or rose petals. But it was perfect. I wouldn’t have changed a single thing about it.
“Sometimes I feel like the seasons could come and go and come and go, a hundred years could pass, a thousand, the ground could collapse under us, this house could crumble and go back to the earth, and we would still be standing here frozen in time, because every second I’m with you is eternal. I’ve never felt anything like it.”
“You’re not asking too much,” he said. “You were just asking the wrong person. Ask me instead.”
“You are not what happened to you. You are what you do next.”
The best kind of love doesn’t happen on moonlit walks and romantic vacations. It happens in between the folds of everyday life. It’s not grand gestures that show how you feel, it’s all the little secret things you do to make her life better that you never tell her about.
It isn’t glamorous, it isn’t all butterflies and stars in your eyes. It’s real. This is the kind of love that forever is made of. Because if it’s this good when life is draining and mundane and hard, think of how wonderful it will be when the love songs are playing and the moon is out.
This is the thing nobody tells you about The One. How they’re timeless.
