The Things We Do for Love

by Kristin Hannah

Memories didn’t live on streets or in cities. They flowed in the blood, pulsed with your heartbeat.

So why did it still hurt, after all these years? You’d think a heart would grow calluses at some point.

Grief was like that; both she and Mama knew it well. It would sometimes feel fresh, no matter how long she lived. Some losses ran deep, and time moved too slowly in a lifetime to heal them completely.

This too shall pass. Life has a way of going on, and you do your best and move with it. A broken heart heals. Like every wound, there’s a scar, a memory, but it fades. Finally you realize that an hour has passed without your thinking about it, then a day.

Some things in life, though, couldn’t be gone in search of. They simply had to be waited for. Like the weather. You could look on the horizon and see a bank of black storm clouds. That didn’t guarantee rain tomorrow. It might just as easily dawn bright and clear. There was no damn way to tell. All you could do was keep moving and live your life.