Only the Beautiful

by Susan Meissner

Why aren’t there places like that for fallen men, I wonder, where they are tsked and told every day that their recklessness has led to disaster?

And I loved even more the notion that its bulb was a promise of beauty to come, despite the harshness of winter.

An amaryllis is always waiting to delight and surprise you, even when your world seems cold and dark.

and I would be reminded that things wouldn’t always be the way they were now.

and I began to plead to heaven with a new request.

People will always distrust what they don’t understand. And what they distrust, they cannot love.

hoping that while Truman Calvert is a coward, he is also a man of his word.

But I know too well this is the way, the only way, to keep close to you someone who is gone from your life. It is better than the alternative—isn’t it?—which is never having had them at all.