Beach Read

by Emily Henry

That was what I’d always loved about reading, what had driven me to write in the first place. That feeling that a new world was being spun like a spiderweb around you and you couldn’t move until the whole thing had revealed itself to you.

I was on a beautiful beach, in a beautiful place, and I was alone. Worse, I wasn’t sure I’d ever stop being alone again.

“We can never fully know the people we love. When we lose them, there will always be more we could have seen,

Sometimes, January, being a parent feels like being a kid who someone has mistakenly handed another kid. “Good luck!” this unwise stranger cries before turning his back on you forever. We will always make mistakes, I’m afraid. I hope they will get smaller and smaller as we get bigger and bigger. Older, really; we’re rather done growing.

But January, sometimes life is very hard. Sometimes it demands so much of you that you start losing pieces of yourself as you stretch out to give what the world wants to take.

Please don’t be afraid, my sweet baby, my daring pirate queen of the open seas. Somehow everything will be okay.

Whatever came next, I could survive it all,