The Truth About Forever

by Sarah Dessen

Maybe that’s what you got when you stood over your grief, facing it finally. A sense of its depths, its area, the distance across, and the way over or around it, whichever you chose in the end.

“Then,” Kristy continued, nodding at her, “life was very short, literally. But now that I’m better, it seems so long I have to squint to see even the edges of it. It’s all in the view, Macy. That’s what I mean about forever, too. For any one of us our forever could end in an hour, or a hundred years from now. You can never know for sure, so you’d better make every second count.”

On Sunday, my sister was cooking dinner, and she needed arugula. I wasn’t entirely sure what that was. But I still got recruited to go look for it with her.

this sent me spiraling

Grief can be a burden, but also an anchor. You get used to the weight, to how it holds you to a place.

We’d start slow, the way we always did, because the run, and the game, could go on for awhile. Maybe even forever. That was the thing. You just never knew. Forever was so many different things. It was always changing, it was what everything was really all about. It was twenty minutes, or a hundred years, or just this instant, or any instant I wished would last and last. But there was only one truth about forever that really mattered, and that was this: it was happening. Right then, as I ran with Wes into that bright sun, and every moment afterwards. Look, there. Now. Now. Now.