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It was becoming clear to me that I shouldn’t bother to get too attached to anything. Turn your back and you lose it. Just like that.
“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.”
listening. “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. I
There’s a entirely different feel to quiet when
you’re with someone else, and at any moment it could be broken. Like the difference between a pause and an ending.
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.
But it was okay not to fit in everywhere, as long as you did somewhere.
Grief can be a burden, but also an anchor. You get used to the weight, to how it holds you to a place.
Just because someone’s pretty doesn’t mean she’s decent. Or vice versa. I’m not into appearances. I like flaws, I think they make things interesting.”
“You’re just setting yourself up to fail, because you’ll never get everything perfect.”
“It was hard, too, I think, because after my dad died my mom kind of freaked and cleaned out all his stuff. I mean, she threw out just about everything. So in a way it was like he’d never been there at all.”
But just talking about anything emotional is hard for her. For us. It’s like she prefers we just not do that anymore.”
“Look, everyone mourns at their own pace. Maybe you’re just a little bit ahead of her, but she’ll get to you eventually.
The more I pulled back, the more he seemed to move forward. I wondered if it was really because he cared about me, or if now I was just another challenge.
Anyone can hide. Facing up to things, working through them, that’s what makes you strong.”
“An empty frame, in which the picture is always changing, makes a statement about how time is always passing. It doesn’t really stop, even in a single image. It just feels that way.”
But if something was really important, fate made sure it somehow came back to you and gave you another chance.
Events conspired to bring you back to where you’d been. It was what you did then that made all the difference: it was all about potential.
There is a certain relief in things getting as bad as they could be.
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.
