The Choice

by Nicholas Sparks

his diet couldn’t be more boring. His friends marveled at the rigidity of his self-control, but what he didn’t tell them was that it had more to do with his limited palate than discipline. When he was ten, he’d been forced to finish a plate of Thai noodles drenched in ginger, and he’d vomited most of the night.

“You gotta know when to be lazy. Done correctly, it’s an art form that benefits everyone.”

“That staring at the stars was like staring backward in time, since some stars are so far away that their light takes millions of years just to reach us. That we see stars not as they look now, but as they were when dinosaurs roamed the earth. The whole concept just struck me as… amazing somehow.”

If conversation was the lyrics, laughter was the music, making time spent together a melody that could be replayed over and over without getting stale.

She recognized the manipulation for what it was, and while her emotions cried out for retribution on her behalf and that of sexually harassed women everywhere, her pragmatic side asserted itself. In the end, she took a job in the emergency room at the hospital.

it’s important to remember that joy can always follow despair. But a moment later, the rainbow had vanished and the hail returned, and he realized that joy was sometimes only an illusion.