Matched (Matched #1)

by Ally Condie

It is strange how we hold on to the pieces of the past while we wait for our futures.

We have not held hands like this since we were children. In doing that tonight, we move across the invisible divide that separates friendship from something more. I feel a tingle along my arm; to be touched, by my Match, is a luxury that the other Matchees at Banquets tonight do not share.

Can something wrong be true?

His tone is mild, but there is, and always has been, something a little deeper and more resonant about his voice. It has a slightly different timbre than most voices. It’s the kind of thing you forget until you hear it again and remember Oh yes. His voice has music.

there is something different about his eyes and I’m not sure what it is. More depth? I wonder what he sees when he looks at me. If he seems to have depth to me, do I seem shallow and transparent to him?

I have to stop looking for Grandfather. He won’t materialize from the trees, no matter how much I wish it could happen.

I am the first to follow the Officer into the trees. They are thick summer green and when I push my way through them, they smell like Grandfather. Perhaps he is in the trees after all.

Look at me, Grandfather, I think to myself, but of course he can’t hear me. Look at me.

Nothing I have written or done has made any difference in this world, and suddenly I know what it means to rage, and to crave.

I tilt my head back again and look at the sun through my closed eyelids. It is stronger than I am; it burns red against the black.

What is it about your voice that makes me want to hear you speak?

“What are you thinking about?” he asks me. I tell him the truth. “The color of your eyes.”

I have a sense of something missed, something missing. Someone missing. Maybe it is me.

I hear a word so soft and quiet I wonder if he said it up on the hill and the wind has just now carried it down to me.

No one can ever really come in, and when it’s time to let them, we don’t know how.

But now I feel like finding out about him is one of the ways I find out about myself. I did not expect to love his words. I did not expect to find myself in them.

Is falling in love with someone’s story the same thing as falling in love with the person himself?

For one entire day I let his kiss burn on my cheek and into my blood, and I don’t push the memory away.

“I thought about angels,” I say. “Angels?” “You know. The ones in the old stories. How they can fly to heaven.” “Do you think anyone believes in them anymore?” he asks. “I don’t know. No. Do you?” “I believe in you,” he says, his voice hushed and almost reverent. “That’s more faith than I ever thought I’d have.”

There is so much that I want. I feel it so much that I am water, a river of want, pooled in the shape of a girl

Cassia, he wrote at the top of the page, in letters that were tall and clear and unafraid, that curled and moved and turned my name into something beautiful, something more than a word. A declaration, a piece of a song, a bit of art, framed by his hands.

The darkness behind doesn’t worry me; neither do the stars ahead.

I think of how perhaps the best way to fly would be with hands full of earth so you always remember where you came from, how hard walking could sometimes be.