Just for the Summer (Part of Your World, #3)

by Abby Jimenez

“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.”

Sometimes I felt like I was roaming this earth as a ghost, seeing everything and feeling nothing.

Not everything that comes out of crisis is bad. Sometimes your traumas are the reason you know how to help.

“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.”

“Good. Now I’m going to tell you something, and I really need you to hear it,” she said. “You can cut me off, cut Justin off, be so small no one can ever find you. Go ahead. Run like the wind, I won’t chase you. But you can’t escape yourself.” I just stared at her. “You are not what happened to you. You are what you do next.”

If you can choose anger or empathy, always choose empathy. And I did. A year ago I would have been mad at her for leaving. It was black and white back then. To me, love meant you stayed. But now I understood that love sometimes means you let someone go.

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.

Home is something that’s always there, I realized. No matter where you are in the world, you know it’s where you left it, unchanged and waiting.