The Longest Ride

by Nicholas Sparks

we shared the longest ride together, this thing called life, and mine has been filled with joy because of you.

For it is one thing to declare one’s love for someone and quite another to accept that loving that person requires sacrificing one’s dreams.

It was not the first kiss we’d ever shared, but in many ways it has become my favorite, if only because it happened when I needed it most, marking the beginning of one of the two most wonderful, and life-altering, periods of my life.

Your heart is still beautiful. Your eyes are still kind, and you are a good and honest man. This is enough to keep you beautiful forever.”

It’s strange, I think, the way our lives turn out. Moments of circumstance, when later combined with conscious decisions and actions and a boatload of hope, can eventually forge a future that seems predestined.

My plea to you is this: despite your sadness, do not forget how happy you have made me; do not forget that I loved a man who loved me in return, and this was the greatest gift I could ever have hoped to receive.

“If we’d never met, I think I would have known that my life wasn’t complete. And I would have wandered the world in search of you, even if I didn’t know who I was looking for.”

‘If there is a heaven, we will find each other again, for there is no heaven without you.’