The Rest of the Story

by Sarah Dessen

The past was always present, in its way, and you can’t help but remember. Even if you can’t remember at all.

There were lots of ways to love someone, I guessed, both by remembering and forgetting.

If life is a journey, wouldn’t you rather be the person behind the wheel than the one just being carried along?”

But all my life I’d felt more like an observer than an active participant. Beside the wheel, not behind. It was safer there, but could be lonely too, or so I was now realizing. Maybe there was a middle ground between living too hard and living at all. Maybe, here, I was finding it.

You can make your life, or life can make you. Was it really that simple of a choice?

“A life isn’t just the pages you know, it’s everything. We just can’t see what’s happened yet.”