The Twelve Days of Dash & Lily (Dash & Lily #2)

by Rachel Cohn

That’s what we have to find out. And this is the way to find out—to wake up each morning and start each day together, to be the continuity for each other even when everything else is discontinuous or fickle or cruel. I know in my heart that I can live without him and I know in my heart that I don’t want to—that’s a good place to start, right?”

“The thing to remember—what I really want you to remember—is that it doesn’t matter whether I actually live at the North Pole or whether I’m the one who brings you presents every Christmas Eve. People like Tanner are going to tell you I’m pretend, and then when you get older, people like Tanner are going to tell you other things are pretend. But you know what to say to that? So what. That’s what you tell them. Because at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter whether the story’s true or not. What matters is the care that’s been put into the story. The love. If something is pretend, that usually means someone has taken the time to build a story for you to live in. And building stories takes a lot of work. And, yes, there will come a time when you’ll see the story isn’t true. But the intentions behind it? Completely true. The love behind it? Also true.”

What an idiot Santa is for flying around alone. Because who would want to travel the world without another person’s heartbeat beside him?

I love you, and it’s driving me crazy to see you so upset. I want to fix it, and I know I can’t. But what I want to do is rewrite the whole world so you can fix it. I want to come up with a story that all the world will choose to celebrate, and in it, the people we love will never get sick, and the people we love will never be sad for long, and there would be unlimited frozen hot chocolate. Maybe if it were up to me I wouldn’t have the whole world collectively believe in Santa Claus, but I would definitely have them collectively believe in something, because there is a messed-up kind of beauty in the way we can all bend over backward to make life seem magical when we want to. In other words, after giving it some thought, I think that reality has the distinct potential to completely suck, and the way to get around that is to step out of reality from time to time and find something a little more enjoyable with someone you completely, unadulteratedly enjoy.

“I think that maybe by pretending, we find out more about who we really are.