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“It’s not that I believe everything happens for a reason,” she said. “It’s just that . . . I just think that some things are meant to be broken. Imperfect. Chaotic. It’s the universe’s way of providing contrast, you know? There have to be a few holes in the road. It’s how life is.”
“But if everything was always smooth and perfect,” she continued, “you’d get too used to that, you know? You have to have a little bit of disorganization now and then. Otherwise, you’ll never really enjoy it when things go right.
That’s one reason why I dress up so much, you know, because people are already staring. Might as well give them a show.
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.”
“What you have to decide,” Kristy said to me, leaning forward, “is how you want your life to be. If your forever was ending tomorrow, would this be how you’d want to have spent it?”
“Listen,” Kristy said, “the truth is, nothing is guaranteed. You know that more than anybody.” She looked at me hard, making sure I knew what she meant. I did. “So don’t be afraid. Be alive.”
Grief can be a burden, but also an anchor. You get used to the weight, to how it holds you to a place.
“You,” I said, “have this whole tall, dark stranger thing going on. Not to mention the tortured artist bit.”
“And you,” he said, “have that whole blonde, cool and collected, perfect smart girl thing going on.” “You’re the boy all the girls want to rebel with,” I said. “You,” he replied, “are the unattainable girl in homeroom who never gives a guy the time of day.”
Anyone can hide. Facing up to things, working through them, that’s what makes you strong.”
“There is never,” Kristy said adamantly, “a time or place for true love. It happens accidentally, in a heartbeat, in a single flashing, throbbing moment.”
“I don’t get it,” Caroline said, bemused. “She’s the only one with wings. Why is that?” There were so many questions in life. You couldn’t ever have all the answers. But I knew this one. “It’s so she can fly,” I said. And then I started to run.
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.
