Reminders of Him

by Colleen Hoover

Are you gonna live in your sadness or are you gonna die in it?”

But what if we were just looking for someone to blame because we were all hurting so much?

I guess realizing your life isn’t compatible with someone else’s doesn’t erase the feelings that are there.

Funny how something that should feel so good can feel so painful when the circumstances aren’t right.

Grudges are heavy, but for the people hurting the most, I suppose forgiveness is even heavier.

You think you know how you’ll react in a terrifying situation, but that’s the thing. You can’t think in a terrifying situation. There’s probably a reason for how disconnected we become to our own thoughts in moments of sheer horror. But that’s exactly how I felt. Disconnected.

There was before you and there was during you. For some reason, I never thought there would be an after you. But there was, and I was in it. I’ll be in it forever.

There are people who find peace in forgiveness, and then there are others who look at forgiveness as a betrayal.

Sometimes I wonder if we’re all born with equal amounts of good and evil. What if no one person is more or less malevolent than another, and that we all just release our bad at different times, in different ways?

It could have just been a coincidence, but it also could have been a sign. A message from wherever he is.

Maybe it doesn’t matter whether something is a coincidence or a sign. Maybe the best way to cope with the loss of the people we love is to find them in as many places and things as we possibly can. And in the off chance that the people we lose are still somehow able to hear us, maybe we should never stop talking to them.