Five Winters

by Kitty Johnson

But now I was thirty-five, and my biological clock was ticking so fast I could hear it in my ears.

“Perhaps it’s best to think of Christmas as just another day. That’s what I’m going to do.”

“Maybe the hardest things are the most worthwhile,”

Our friendship would never be quite the same once I had a child. But that didn’t mean it wouldn’t continue, did it? We’d been friends forever. We always would be.

Everyone was vulnerable beneath the surface. Some people just hid it better than others.

“And I do hope you won’t wake up one day and regret everything you could have had with Jaimie.”

I wasn’t in love with Jaimie. I had never been in love with Jaimie. Because I was still head over heels in love with Mark.

You couldn’t will yourself to love people, just as—apparently—you couldn’t will yourself to stop loving them.

“I’m not sure love can be trusted anyway. Well, not love, but the whole being-in-love thing. Not if it means you can’t really see a person. Because you need to be able to really see a person, don’t you? To judge whether you’ve got a good future together or not?”

Maybe we needed all that wrong stuff, all that life, to get to this perfect moment.”