- I'd powered through the last two years with my eyes on one thing, which was getting out. Getting gone. Making the grades I needed to finally live a life that was all my own. No wedding planning. No messy romantic entanglements. No revolving door of stepfathers. Just me and the future, finally together. Now there was a happy ending I could believe in.
- Sometimes I thought if she could read my mind it would kill her. Or both of us.
- But I always worked harder when I was up against something, or when someone assumed I couldn't succeed. That's what drove me, all those nights studying. The fact that so many figured I couldn't do it.
- I feel like a wound in a bad place, prone to be bumped on corners or edges. Never able to heal.
- What did it feel like, I wondered, to love someone that much? So much that you couldn't even control yourself when they came close, as if you might just break free of whatever was holding you and throw yourself at them with enough force to easily overwhelm you both.
- She said writing novels was like childbirth: if you truly remembered how awful it got, you'd never do it again.
- "I think she loves him," Lissa said. "And love is needing someone. Love is putting up with someone's bad qualities because they somehow complete you."
- And all of it came down to one thing: love, or the lack of it. The chances we take, knowing no better, to fall or to stand back and hold ourselves in, protecting our hearts with the tightest of grips.
- Maybe a marriage, like a life, isn't only about the Big Moments, whether they be bad or good. Maybe it's all the small things—like being guided slowly forward, surely, day after day—that stretch out to strengthen even the most tenuous bond.
- And there we had it. Closure. The last item of so many, eliminated from my list with a big, thick check mark. I could almost feel the weight of it lifting, the slow, steady feeling as all my planets aligned and everything, at least for now, was right with the world.
- I leaned into her, instead of away, appreciating the pull I felt there, something almost magnetic that held us to each other. I knew it would always be there, no matter how much of the world is put between us. That strong sense of what we shared, good and bad, that led us to here.
- And a secure bubble that I'd drawn so tightly around myself that no one, not even someone with the best of intentions, could get in, even if I wanted them to. The only way to truly reach me was to sneak up, crash in, bust past the barricades on the equivalent of a kamikaze mission, end result unknown.
- Some things don't last forever, but some things do. Like a good song, or a good book, or a good memory you can take out and unfold in your darkest times, pressing down the corners and peering in close, hoping you still recognize the person you see there.
- Right now, though, I wanted not to think forward or backward, but only to lose myself in the words. So I lay back, closing my eyes, and let them fill my mind, new and familiar all at once, rising and falling with my very breath, steady, as they sang me to sleep.
jan 18 2012 ∞
jan 18 2012 +
jan 18 2012 +