The Longest Ride

by Nicholas Sparks

In college, there aren’t that many guys like that, and why would there be? When girls just give it away for nothing? I mean, I can understand

why you’d sleep with someone if you love them, but if you barely know them? What’s the point? It just cheapens it.” She fell silent, realizing that he was the first person she’d ever admitted all this to.

I understand that love and tragedy go hand in hand, for there can’t be one without the other, but nonetheless I find myself wondering whether the trade-off is fair.

I was not meant to be alone. I am not good at it. The years since Ruth’s passing have ticked by with the kind of desperate silence known only to the elderly. It is a silence underscored by loneliness and the knowledge that the good years are already in the past,

It was the silence that did it. The silence that I still experience now, a silence that descended after the other mourners went away. At the time, I was not used to it. It was oppressive, suffocating—so quiet that it eventually became a roar that drowned out everything else. And slowly but surely, it leached me of my ability to care.