The Wish

by Nicholas Sparks

And in the end, isn’t that the most important thing in life? To be truly known and loved by someone you’ve chosen?”

“She said that life was about seasons, and that the season had changed.”

“Why would you want to be more like me?” Aunt Linda had asked, taken aback. “Because you’re…wonderful.” “Oh, honey.” Aunt Linda had reached over with a hand so birdlike and frail that it nearly broke Maggie’s heart. She gently squeezed Maggie’s fingers. “Don’t you realize that I could say exactly the same thing about you?”

The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.

When I thought back, it seemed like I’d spent all my time trying to get people to like me, as opposed to figuring out whether I liked them.

issue. He’d been free to be himself, and it made me wonder who I would have become had I not been so caught up in trying to be exactly like my friends.

I was still wondering why she didn’t seem interested in my new passion. “Sometimes.”

“Would you like to see some of my photographs?” It took him a few seconds to answer. “I wouldn’t know what I was seeing.”

I thought about how they felt as they lifted a brush, adding color and wonder to a blank canvas and feeling—if only for a brief moment—that they were like other girls their age, unburdened by past mistakes. And I knew that they felt the same way I did when I stared through the lens, that finding and creating beauty could illuminate even the darkest periods.

The sun was going down and had my parents not been here, he and I would have begun playing around with the camera, trying to capture the perfect light of the golden hour. In those moments, I realized, my world shrank to nothing but the task at hand while expanding exponentially at the same time.

And yet, the heart is a funny thing, because even though I knew there was no future for Bryce and me, I would lie awake at night listening to the gentle lapping of sea against the shoreline, knowing that a big part of me simply didn’t care.

I wondered if his feelings for me had more to do with simple proximity than with anything particularly unique and wonderful about me. I fretted that I wasn’t smart or pretty enough, and even momentarily questioned whether I’d made the whole thing up. And while I tossed and turned, it dawned on me that love was the most powerful emotion of all, because it made you vulnerable to the possibility of losing everything that really mattered.

“Do you remember when I told you that I wanted a different ending to the story of Bryce and me?” “Of course,” I said. She gazed up at me, the ghost of a smile playing on her lips. “With you, I got the ending that I wanted.”

bruises. “But never forget that love is always stronger than fear. Love saved me, and I know it will save you, too.”

For the music, she chose “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life,” from the movie Dirty Dancing. Her parents didn’t understand the choice, but I did, and as the song played, I tried to picture Bryce and Maggie sitting on the couch together on one of her final nights in Ocracoke.