A Million Junes

by Emily Henry

some people are too alive to fully die, their stories too big to disappear,

It carries the feelings you exhale into someone else’s inhalations, it syncs your heartbeats, connects you to everyone else who loves it like you do.

She’s most beautiful when she’s this relentless kind of happy. Maybe that’s when everyone is their most beautiful, especially to those who love them.

Sorry is a white flag, an I can’t help you.

hurt will have burned off like morning mist does as the sun rises higher.

You want to dig your fingernails and teeth into the ghost that’s slipping through your fingers.

Grief is an unfillable hole in your body. It should be weightless, but it’s heavy. Should be cold, but it burns. Should, over time, close up, but instead it deepens.

Only in memory it looks shinier than it was.

“I think life is about learning to dance even when you’re sitting still.

“Most of the time, when you regret something, you haven’t seen what the thing you regret can lead you to, if you let it. Some of the worst things that have happened to me have led to some of the best.”

I’m just realizing that hurting someone doesn’t mean you don’t love them, and being mad at someone doesn’t mean you stop loving them.”

“When I’m with you, I remember there’s such a thing as a present, and a future.

The sketchbooks devoted to your neck and shoulders and hands? How when I bite into a cherry, it’s not the sun I taste but you? How, for me, the whole world isn’t made up of lakes and trees but of your millions of shades?”

for some people, falling in love is an explosion, fireworks against a black sky and tremors rumbling through the earth. One blazing moment. For me, it’s been happening for months, as quietly as a seed sprouting. Love sneaked through me, spreading roots around my heart, until, in the blink of an eye, the green of it broke the dirt: hidden one moment, there the next.

I will love you after all the stars have burned out, after the sun has died and ice has covered the earth, after the last human has taken her last breath.

We may just be moments, June, but to love a handful of people very well, that’s a good life.