Again Again

by E. Lockhart

To Adelaide, the boy was a promise. He promised her that happiness could still exist, could still be hers.

She wanted to see all his scars, see all of him, and she felt suddenly, intensely certain that he was a safe person to show her own scars to.

Maybe we have known each other always. Maybe our hearts encountered each other somehow,

Still, the place smelled of old money. And a century of male dominance.

Human beings were capable of creating beauty and strangeness far beyond what nature offered.

Maybe such things are real. There’s no proof they aren’t.

She had never before thought of her own life with nostalgia as she’d lived it—but that summer it was overwhelming. This will never happen again, she thought. We will never be like this again. Hold on to this feeling. Remember it.

“Tragedy is a pinnacle of human experience,” Kaspian-Lee went on. “Not that any of us wants to experience it, but we like to think about tragedy quite a lot. That’s why Shakespeare wrote tragedies, and the Greeks.

The repetitions in the reflection offered no exit. This wasn’t a room you could enter or leave. It was the inside of a mind, both infinite and constrained into repetition. Maybe that was the point.

I am a person whose character flaw is that he sometimes tries new experiences that are VERY BAD IDEAS.

Think of your happy memories. Know they are still in you. They are part of you. And maybe even they ARE you.

“The whole idea of virginity is just a sham tool of the patriarchy anyway.”

I am doing a display of hiding nothing, Which means that in fact, I am hiding something. And what I am hiding is that even though I am not up to anything,

Some days are hard. I just want to go numb.

She almost changed how I feel about the thing that I made, and that just feels wrong, do you know? Shouldn’t I decide how I feel about the thing I made?”

“The process of making something changes a person.”

“And this other guy, he makes you happy?” “It’s not his job to make me happy,” she told him.

The process of making would stretch open the universe until it was frighteningly and gloriously wide with possibility.