Hopeless

by Colleen Hoover

You can’t get mad at a real ending. Some of them are ugly. It’s the fake happily-ever-afters that should piss you off.”

Not everything is going to go my way and not everyone gets a happily-ever-after. Life is real and sometimes it’s ugly and you just have to learn how to cope. I’m going to accept it with a dose of your indifference, and move on.

“You don’t deserve words, Sky. You deserve actions.”

It’s intriguing, because you can’t do this with real life. You can’t just end a chapter, then skip the things you don’t want to live through, only to open it up to a chapter that better suits your mood. Life can’t be divided into chapters… only minutes. The events of your life are all crammed together one minute right after the other without any time lapses or blank pages or chapter breaks because no matter what happens life just keeps going and moving forward and words keep flowing and truths keep spewing whether you like it or not and life never lets you pause and just catch your fucking breath.

I know exactly what he’s feeling, because our pain is shared now. Whatever he goes through, I feel. Whatever I go through, he feels. It’s what happens when two people become one: they no longer share only love. They also share all of the pain, heartache, sorrow, and grief.

“Sky, if you’re wondering if I have commitment issues, the answer is no. Someday in the far, far, far away future… like postcollege future… when I propose to you… which I will be doing one day because you aren’t getting rid of me… I won’t be marrying you with the hope that our marriage will work out. When you become mine, it’ll be a forever thing. I’ve told you before that the only thing that matters to me with you are the forevers, and I mean that.”

We wrap our arms around each other and we cry. We cry mother to daughter. We cry aunt to niece. We cry victim to victim. We cry survivor to survivor.

They remind me of me, and everything I’ve had to overcome to get to this point in my life. And while I could sit here and feel sorry for myself, wondering why all of this happened to me… I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to wish for a perfect life. The things that knock you down in life are tests, forcing you to make a choice between giving in and remaining on the ground or wiping the dirt off and standing up even taller than you did before you were knocked down. I’m choosing to stand up taller. I’ll probably get knocked down a few more times before this life is through with me, but I can guarantee you I’ll never stay on the ground.