Those Who Save Us

by Jenna Blum

So you see, he says softly, we are all ashamed in one way or another. Who among us is not stained by the past?

She can never tell him what she started to say: that we come to love those who save us. For although Anna does believe this is true, the word that stuck in her throat was not save but shame.

Life is so often unfair and painful and love is hard to find and you have to take it whenever and wherever you can get it, no matter how brief it is or how it ends.

Each person has this choice to make about how to live with the past, this dignity, this inviolable right.