Vanishing Acts

'If you want something to be true badly enough, you can rewrite it that way, in your head.  You can even start to believe it.'

'It takes two people to make a lie work: the person who tells it, and the one who believes it.'

'Some lessons can't be taught, they simply have to be learned.'

'You make yourself strong because it's expected of you. You become confident because someone beside you is unsure. You turn into the person others need you to be.'

'You can't exist in this world without leaving a piece of yourself behind.'

'It took me a lifetime to realize things don't get lost if they don't have value- you don't miss what you don't care about.'

'There are two kinds of love...in the safe kind you look for someone who's exactly like you. It's what most folks settle for. But then there's the other kind of love. Everyone's born with a ragged edge, and some folks crave that piece that's a perfect fit. You'll search for it forever, if you have to. And if you're lucky enough to find it, it looks so right, you start to tear at your own seams, thinking, maybe I could look just as perfect. But then, of course, when you try to get close to their other half, you don't fit anymore. That kind of love...you come out of it a different person than you were when you started.'

'Just because you keep something a secret doesn't mean it never happened, no matter how much you want that to be true.'

'It's choice that makes us human.'

'What is right, in the end, is not always what it seems to be, and some rules are better broken.'

'The truth was, history repeated itself on a daily basis; mistakes were made over and over.  People were haunted by what they had done, and by what they hadn't had time to do.'

'You can't edit a blank page.'

'Take it from me: love has all the lasting permanence of a rainbow- beautiful while it's there, and just as likely to have disappeared by the time you blink.'

'Sometimes there aren't words. The silence between us is flung wide as an ocean. But I manage to reach across it, to wrap my arms around him.'

'Change is a funny thing. We never are quite sure what we are becoming or even why. Then one day we look at ourselves and wonder who we are and how we got that way. Only one thing about change remains constant...it is always painful.'

'If you spent your life concentrating on what everyone else thought of you, would you forget who you really were? What if the face you showed the world turned out to be a mask... with nothing beneath it?'

'The damage was permanent; there would always be scars.  But even the angriest scars faded over time until it was difficult to see them written on the skin at all, and the only thing that remained was the memory of how painful it had been.'

'Whether or not you believe in Fate comes down to one thing: who do you blame when something goes wrong.'

'I've always sort of wondered: If everyone else's opinion is what matters, then do you ever really have one of your own?'

'Sometimes, when you don't ask questions, it's not because you are afraid that someone will lie to your face.  It's because you're afraid they'll tell you the truth.'
'What if it turns out that a life isn't defined by who you belong to or where you came from, by what you wished for or whom you've lost, but instead by the moments you spend getting from each of these places to the next?'

'Is Fate getting what you deserve, or deserving what you get?'

'You can fool yourself, you know. You'd think it's impossible, but it turns out it's the easiest thing of all.'

'Who I am, and what I am capable of doing has always managed to surprise me.'

'I could tell her from personal experience that when people we love make choices we don't always understand them. But we can go on loving them, just the same. It isn't a matter of comprehension. It's forgiveness. But all this took me a lifetime to discover, and where has it gotten me?'

'I understand better than she'd imagine that history is indelible. You can mask it; you can patch it smooth and clear; but you always know what's hidden underneath.'

'How can you be a survivor, when you can't even remember the war?'

'I don't know why it's called "getting lost."  Even when you turn down the wrong street, when you find yourself at the dead end of a chain-link fence or a road that turned to sand, you are somewhere.  It just isn't where you expected to be.'

'Sometimes we find ourselves walking through life blindfolded, and we try to deny that we're the ones who securely tied the knot.'

'If you choose to be looking for something, you'd better be ready for whatever it is you are find. Because it may not be what you've been expecting.'

'If you had grown up with me, this is one of the things I would have tried to teach you: Marry a man who loves you more than you love him. Because I have both now, and when it is the other way around, there is no spell in the world that can even out the balance.'

'Love is not an equation... It is not a contract, and it's not a happy ending. It is the slate under the chalk and the ground buildings rise from and the oxygen in the air.'

'You can boil your life down to a single suitcase, if you desperately have to. Ask yourself what you really need, and it won't be what you imagine - you will easily toss aside unfinished work, and bills, and your daily calendar to make room for the pair of flannel pajamas you wear when it rains; and the stone your child gave you that is shaped like a heart; and the battered paperback you revisit every April because it was what you were reading the first time you fell in love. It turns out that what's important is not everything that you've accumulated all these years, but those few things you can carry with you.'

'I would figure out, later, how to explain to my boss that, for me, Delia will never be a story, but a happy ending.'

'When you're pregnant, you can think of nothing but having your own body to yourself again; yet after giving birth you realize that the biggest part of you is now somehow external...'

'There are some things, I think, you're better off not remembering.'

'It it strange, suddenly having a memory come back out of nowhere. You think you're going crazy; you wonder where this recollection has been hiding all your life. You try to push it away, because you think you've hammered out the whole timeline of your life, but then you see that one extra moment, and suddenly you are breaking apart what you though was a solid segment, and seeing it for what it is: just a string of events, shoulder to shoulder, and a gap where there is room for one more.'

'We make messes of our lives, but every now and then, we manage to do something that's exactly right. The challenge is figuring out which is which.'

'It is strange to think that we might have crossed paths, and still not have known what we were missing.'

'There is a fine line between seeing something that's lost as missing, and seeing it as something that might be found.'

'You can widen the feet of a compass, but they are still attached at the top; you can spin them away from each other, but you always wind up where you started.'

'No one gets to start where they left off; it just doesn't work that way.'

'Whether it is conscious or not, you eventually make the decision to divide your life in half - before and after - with loss being that tight bubble in the middle. You can move around in spite of it; you can laugh and smile and carry on with your life, but all it takes is one slow range of motion, a doubling over, to be fully aware of the empty space at your center.'

'For someone who can't remember very much, there seems to be a lot I can't forget.'

'Why do some memories bleed out of nowhere and others stay locked behind doors?'

'Not everyone understands how you can spin two lassos at the same time, one of hope and one of grief.'

'It was the first time she'd discovered something she really didn't want to find, and she didn't know what to do once she'd found it.'

'The only way someone can leave you is if you let them.'

'That's the strange thing about being a mother: until you have a baby, you don't even realize how much you were missing one.'

'For God's sake, if I learned anything during this damn trial it's that the only way someone can leave you is if you let them. And I'm not doing that, Dee. It may look like that today, or tomorrow, or even a month from now, but one day you're going to wake up and see that this whole time you've been gone, you've only been headed back to where you started. And I'll be there, waiting.' He leans forward and kisses me once, feather-light, on the lips. 'It's not like I'm not letting you go,' he murmurs. 'I'm just trusting you enough to come back.'

'Sometimes, I think my whole life has been about holding onto you.'

'When your mother is made out of your dreams, anything real is bound to disappoint you.'

'Is it a crime when you love someone so much that you can't stand the thought of them changing? Is it a crime when you love someone so much that you can't see clearly?'

'Elise Vasquez and I stand shoulder to shoulder, watching the woman we both feel we lost, and may be never really had.'

'Eric understands that the world is rarely the way it is supposed to be. And he knows that, given the chance, we don't have to wait for someone to make messes of our lives. We do a good enough job, ourselves.'

'Sometimes we don't know we're dreaming; we can't even fathom that we're asleep.'

'How do you walk into someone's life again after twenty-eight years? How do you pick up, when you were too young to know where you left off.'

'In half hour my mother has managed to give me what my father couldn't: my past.'

'Neither of us, it turns out, has been the only one who lost someone she loved.'

'Memories aren't stored in the heart or the head or even the soul, if you ask me, but in the spaces between any given two people.'

'Life is not a plot; it's in the details.'

'Suddenly this is all too hard. I am tired of putting up walls. I want someone with the strength - and the honesty - to break them down.'

'What could you give me,' I ask, my voice shaking, 'to make me forget ... that you forgot about me?'

'Do you ever go back?' Ruthann nods, 'When I need to remember where I came from, or where I'm headed.'

'If you want to know someone's story, they have to tell it aloud. But every time, the telling is a little but different. It's new, even to me.'

'...when they look at me, I so badly want to be who they see.'

'When you're a parent you find yourself looking at the unknown that is your child, trying to find a piece of yourself inside her, because sometimes that is what it takes to claim. Sometimes parents don't find what they're looking for it their child, so they plant seeds for what they'd like to grow there instead. I've witnessed this with the former hockey player who takes his son out to skate before he can even walk. Or in the mother who gave up her ballet dreams when she married, but now scrapes her daughter's hair into a bun and watched from the wings of the stage. We are not, as you'd expect, orchestrating their lives; we are not even trying for a second chance. We are hoping that if this one thing takes root, it might take up enough light and space to keep something else from developing in our children: the disappointment we've already lived.'

'Sometimes knowing what's right isn't a rational decision, or even what works on paper. Sometimes leaving is the best course of action after all.'

'That's the crazy thing about lies. You start to fall for them, yourself.'

'You can't hate someone until you know what it might be like to love them.'

'I would tell them that when you look at a person, you never know what the're hiding.'

'We sit for a few more moments, although there's really nothing left to say. This is new to me, too, an entire 
conversation that takes place in silence, because the heart has its own language. I will remember what Eric says even though he doesn't say a word. I will tell it to her.'

'Bad is not an absolute, but a relative term. Ask the robber who used the cash he stole to feed his infant; the rapist who was sexually abused as a child; the kidnapper who truly believed he was saving a life. And just because you break the law doesn't mean you have intentionally crossed the line into evil. Sometimes the line creeps up on you, and before you know it, you're standing on the other side.

If you spent your life concentrating on what everyone else thought of you, would you forget who you really were? What if the face you showed the world turned out to be a mask... with nothing beneath it?

I've always sort of wondered: If everyone else's opinion is what matters, then do you ever really have one of your own?

As a child, what I was missing was so much bigger to me than what I had.  My mother-mythic, imaginary-was a deity and a superhero and a comfort all at once.  If only I'd had her, surely, she would have been the answer to every problem; if only I'd had her , she would have been the cure for everything that ever had gone wrong in my life.

When you don't know where you're headed, you find places no one else would ever explore.

What is right, in the end, is not always what it seems to be, and some rules are better broken.

Dear John

- What mattered most was knowing that love was mine to give, without strings or expectations.
- It's possible to go on, no matter how impossible it seems, and that in time, the grief . . . lessens. It may not go away completely, but after a while it's not so overwhelming.
- Our story has three parts: a beginning, a middle, and an end. And although this is the way all stories unfold, I still can't believe that ours didn't go on forever.
- I'd learned that some things are best kept secret.
- But...as bad as it was, I learned something about myself.  That I could go through something like that and survive.  I mean, I know it could have been worse--a lot worse-- but for me, it was all I could have handled at the time.  And I learned from it.
- In our time together, you claimed a special place in my heart, one I'll carry with me forever and that no one can ever replace.
- Regrets about the journey, maybe, but not the destination.
- When you're struggling with something, look at all the people around you and realize that every single person you see is struggling with something, and to them, it's just as hard as what you're going through.
- I finally understood what true love meant...love meant that you care for another person's happiness more than your own, no matter how painful the choices you face might be.
- We'd met at a carefree time, a moment full of promise, in its place now were the harsh lessons of the real world.
- Part of me aches at the thought of her being so close yet so untouchable, but her story and mine are different now. It wasn't easy for me to accept this simple truth, because there was a time when our stories were the same, but that was six years and two lifetimes ago.
- I fell in love with her when we were together, then fell deeper in love with her in the years we were apart.
- I've been burdened by questions I've asked myself a thousand times since the last time we were together. 
Why did I do it? And would I do it again? 
It was I, you see, who ended it.

- If you come back; I'll marry you. If you break your promise, you'll break my heart.

- It's your eyes. They're ... more serious than they used to be. Like they've seen things they shouldn't have.
- I'm going to marry you one day, you know." 
"Is that a promise?" 
"If you want it to be."

My Sisters Keeper

   Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it's not because they enjoy solitude. It's because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them. 


   Seeing her sitting there unresponsive makes me realize that silence has a sound. 


   Do you know how sometimes - when you are riding your bike and you start skidding across sand, or when you miss a step and start tumbling down the stairs - you have those long, long seconds to know that you are going to be hurt, and badly? 


   I wondered what happened when you offered yourself to someone, and they opened you, only to discover you were not the gift they expected and they had to smile and nod and say thank you all the same.

   It's disappointing to know that someone can see right through you. 


   It's about a girl who is on the cusp of becoming someone.. A girl who may not know what she wants right now, and she may not know who she is right now, but who deserves the chance to find out. 


   Sometimes to get what you want the most, you have to do what you want the least. 


   It doesn't take a whole long life to realize that what we deserve to have, we rarely get. 


   See, as much as you want to hold on to the bitter sore memory that someone has left this world, you are still in it.


   I learn from my own daughter that you don't have to be awake to cry. 


   You know how every now and then, you have a moment where your whole life stretches out ahead of you like a forked road, and even as you choose one gritty path you've got your eyes on the other the whole time, certain that you're making a mistake. 


   You don't love someone because they're perfect, you love them in spite of the fact that they're not. 


   Maybe who we are isn't so much about what we do, but rather what we're capable of when we least expect it. 


   There are always sides. There is always a winner and a loser. For every person who gets, there's someone who must give.  


   There should be a statute of limitation on grief. A rulebook that says it is all right to wake up crying, but only for a month. That after 42 days you will no longer turn with your heart racing, certain you have heard her call out your name. That there will be no fine imposed if you feel the need to clean out her desk; take down her artwork from the refrigerator; turn over a school portrait as you pass - if only because it cuts you fresh again to see it. That it's okay to measure the time she has been gone, the way we once measured her birthdays.


   There are some things we do because we convince ourselves it would be better for everyone involved.  We tell ourselves that it's the right thing to do, the altruistic thing to do.  It's far easier than telling ourselves the truth. 


   Kids think with their brains cracked wide open; becoming an adult, I've decided, is only a slow sewing shut.  


   And the very act of living is a tide; at first it seems to make no difference at all, and then one day you look down and see how much pain has eroded.


   I sometimes wonder if it is just me, or if there are other women who figure out where they are supposed to be by going nowhere. 


   In the English language there are orphans and widows, but there is no word for the parents who loses a child. 


   He smiles at me, and I am suddenly seventeen again - the year I realize that love doesn't follow the rules, the year I understood that nothing is worth having so much as something unattainable.


   I ...understand how a parent might hit a child- it's because you can look into their eyes and see a reflection of yourself that you wish you hadn't. 


   It is a remarkable question- Do all the wonderful things happen when we are not aware of them? 


   The bottom line is that we never fall for the people we're supposed to.


   Lately, I have been having nightmares, where I'm cut into so many pieces that there isn't enough of me to be put back together. 


   Until this moment, I had not realized that someone could break your heart twice, along the very same fault lines.


   A photo says, you were happy, and I wanted to catch that. A photo says, you were so important to me that I put down everything else to come watch. 


   Once you had put the pieces back together, even though you may look intact, you were never quite the same as you'd been before the fall. 
   
   Love is not an equation, it is not a contract, and it is not a happy ending. Love is the slate under the chalk, the ground that buildings rise, and the oxygen in the air. It is the place you come back to, no matter where your headed.


   I didn't want to see her because it would make me feel better. I came because without her, it's hard to remember who I am... 


   Life was what happened when all the what-ifs didn't, when what you dreamed or hoped or in this case feared might come to pass passed by instead.  


   If you ask me, music is the language of memory.


   Everyone thinks you make mistakes when you're young. But I don't think we make any fewer when we're grown up.


   Dylan Jerome," the lawyer admits, "wanted to sue God for not caring enough about him.


   I do know that there are some things, though, that occur without a direct line of antecedents. 


   If you have a sister and she dies, do you stop saying you have one? Or are you always a sister, even when the other half of the equation is gone? 


   I have only known her for two years. But if you took every memory, every moment, if you stretched them end to end-they'd reach forever. 


   Remember that every fire will burn itself out, even without your help. 


   The human capacity for burden is like bamboo- far more flexible than you'd ever believe at first glance. 


   There are just as many stories to be told in the dark spots s there are in the bright ones. 


   I had the heart of the relationship, and no body to grow it in... It broke.  


   Do you fix a wheel that isn't broken, or do you wait until the cart collapses? 


   Life isn't nearly as stable as we want it to be. 


   Once you sign on to be a mother, that's the only shift they offer. 


   Time is an optical illusion- never quite as solid or strong as we think it is.


   Parenting is really just a matter of tracking, of hoping your kids do not get so far ahead you can no longer see their next moves.  


   "You are so brave," I tell her, and then I smile. "When I grow up, I want to be just like you."
To my surprise, Kate shakes her head hard. Her voice is a feather, a thread. 
"No Mommy," she says. "You'd be sick."


   There's some illogical part of me hat still believes if you want Superman to show up, first there's got to be someone worth saving. 


   On the surface, we're polar opposites.  Under the skin, though, we're the same:  people think they know what they're getting, and they're always wrong. 


   But I didn't frame it; I put into an envelope and sealed it and stuffed it far back into a corner drawer of a filing cabinet. It's there, just in case one of these days I start to lose her.
There might be a morning when I wake up and her face isn't the first thing I see. Or a lazy August afternoon when I can't quite recall anymore where the freckles were on her right shoulders. Maybe one of these days, I will not be able to listen to the sound of snow falling and hear her footsteps. 


   A girl who is thirteen-which is hard, and difficult, and beautiful, and painful, and exhilarating. 


   There is a curious thing that happens with the passage of time: a calcification of character. 


   I realize then that we never have children, we receive them. 


   And sometimes it's not for quite as long as we would have expected or hoped. But it is still far better than never having had those children at all.


   It's like picking up an unfamiliar piece of sheet music & starting to stumble through it, only to realize it is a melody you'd once learned by heart, one you can play without even trying. 


   Love has all the lasting permanence of a rainbow - beautiful while it's there, and just as likely to have disappeared by the time you blink. 


   A fire can't burn forever. Eventually, it consumes itself. 


   I don't want to make the same mistake twice. I don't  want to tell myself it's over when it's not. 


   No matter who you are, there is some part of you that always wishes you were someone else. 


   Life sometimes gets so bogged down in the details, you forget you are living it. There is always another appointment to be met, another bill to pay, another symptom presenting, another uneventful day to be notched onto the wooden wall. We have synchronized our watches, studied our calendars, existed in minutes, and completely forgotten to step back and see what we've accomplished. 


   Change isn't always for the worst; the shell that forms around a piece of sand looks to some people like an irritation, and to others, like a pearl. 


   Listen, I would say, this is not how I thought our lives would go and may be we cannot find our way out of this alley. But there is no one I'd rather be lost with. 


   I used to think I'd be just like them when I grew up, but I am not. And the thing is, somewhere along the way, I stopped wanting to be like them, anyway. 


   It's hard to be the one always waiting. I mean, there's something to be said for the hero who charges off to battle, but when you get right down to it there's a whole story in who's left behind. 


   I can't answer a single one of these, which is how I know that whether I'm ready or not, I'm growing up. 


   See, I get a round, hollow spot in my belly knowing I could tell him what's coming, but also knowing it would come out sounding like a warning. 


   May be there are entire worlds where there are no fences, where feeling bears you like a tide. 


   I have never understood why it is called losing a child. No parent is that careless. We all know exactly where our sons and daughters are; we just don't necessarily want them to be there.


    Nowadays, I don't have expectations, and this way she beats them all. 


   I used to pretend that I was just passing through this family on my way to my real one. 


   I look for places like me: big, hollow, forgotten by most everyone. 


   Is it because they are so comfortable, they already know what the other is thinking? Or is it because after a certain point, there is simply nothing left to say? 


   Extraordinary things are always hiding in places people never think to look. 


   "I remember everything Campbell," she interrupts. "If I didn't, this wouldn't be so hard."


   It feels like we are sitting on the tight bench of a bus with a stranger between us, one that neither of us is willing to admit or mention, and so we find ourselves talking around him and through him and sneaking glances when the other one isn't looking. 


   Her hair is longer now, and fine lines bracket her mouth, parentheses around a lifetime of words I was not around to hear. 


   In my family, we seem to have a tortured history of not saying what we ought to and not meaning what we do. 


   This is when I realize that Anna has already left the table, and more importantly, that nobody noticed. 


   It is so easy to presume that while your own world has ground to an absolute halt, so has everyone else's. 


   There is nothing worse than silence, strung like heavy beads on too delicate a conversation. 


   What I want, more than anything, is to turn back time a little. To become the kid I used to be, who believed whatever my mother said was one hundred percent true and right without looking hard enough to see the hairline crack. 


   Following my mother's footsteps was the surest way out. 


   It is the things you cannot see coming that are strong enough to kill you. 


   Shooting stars are not stars at all. They re just rocks that enter the atmosphere and catch fire under friction. What we wish on  when we see one  is only a trail of debris. 


   Dark matter has a gravitation effect on other objects. You can't see it, you can't feel it, but you can watch something being pulled in its direction.  

A Secret Affair

The ugliness at the heart of beauty. Is there always ugliness, do you suppose? Even when the object is very, very beautiful?

I prefer to believe the opposite - that there is always an indestructible beauty at the heart of darkness.

Did everyone make the most ghastly blunders at regularly intervals through their life and live to regret them ever  afterward? Was everyone's life filled with confusing and contradictory mix of guilt and innocence, hatred and love, concern and unconcern, and any number of other pairings of polar opposites? Or were most people one thing or the other - good or bad, cheerful or crotchety, generous or miserly, and so on.

Everyone was a rose but even more complex than a mere flower. Everyone was made up of infinitely layered petals. And everyone had something indescribably precious at the heart of their being.
No one was shallow. Not really.

Why did people assume that the beautiful among them needed nothing but their beauty to bring them happiness? That behind the beauty there was nothing but an empty shell, insensitive shell?

Always guarding one's real, precious self in a cocoon of tranquility within a thousand masks.

Life itself had become a secret affair.

When I was nineteen," she said, "I was in love with being in love, I think. And I was given no chance to discover how deep - or not deep - that love would have gone.

All is artifice in my world, Constantine. Even me. Especially me. He taught me to be a duchess, to be an impregnable fortress, to be the guardian of my own heart, But he admitted that he could not teach me how or when to allow the fortress to be breached or my heart to be unlocked. It would simply happen, he said. he promised it would, in fact. But how is love to find me, even assuming it is looking?

Love does not deck the beloved in chains. It just is.

He had always felt that he lived on the edges of life, Constantine realized, watching everyone else living, sometimes helping them do it.

Suddenly, and for the first time, he was at the center of his own life, living it and loving it.

One did not tell a woman that one was going to marry her and then fail to ask.
Not, presumably, unless one was Constantine Huxtable.

"He taught me to rescue and nurture and strengthen that broken person within," she said, "so that she could be strong again. He enabled me to love myself again, without vanity, but with acceptance of who I was behind the appearance that has always attracted so many in such superficial way. He taught me that I could love again - I loved him - and that I could trust love - I trusted his. He left me still a little fragile but ready to test my wings. That was my pain, Constantine. It still is my pain. I hover a little uncertainly behind the invulnerable armor of the Duchess of Dunbarton."

Gone with the Wind

"Now she had a fumbling knowledge that, had she ever understood Ashley, she would never have loved him; had she ever understood Rhett, she would never have lost him."
"I'll think of it tomorrow, at Tara. I can stand it then. Tomorrow, I'll think of some way to get him back. After all, tomorrow is another day."
"Burdens are for shoulders strong enough to carry them."
"Perhaps - I want the old days back again and they'll never come back, and I am haunted by the memory of them and of the world falling about my ears."
"Dear Scarlett! You aren't helpless. Anyone as selfish and determined as you are is never helpless."
"Vanity was stronger than love at sixteen and there was no room in her hot heart now for anything but hate. It was better to know the worst than to wonder."
"Child, it's a very bad thing for a woman to face the worst that can happen to her, because after she's faced the worst she can't ever really fear anything again. ....Scarlett, always save something to fear - even as you save something to love.... Make up your mind to this."
"If you are different, you are isolated, not only from people of your own age but from those of your parents' generation and from your children's generation too.  They'll never understand you and they'll be  shocked no matter what you do.  But your grandparents would probably be proud of you and say: 'Theres a chip off the old block,' and your grandchildren will sigh enviously and say: 'What an old rip Grandma must have been!' and they'll try to be like you."
"Yes, I want money more than anything else in the world."
"Then you've made the only choice. But there's a penalty attached, as there is to most things you want. It's loneliness."
"Life is under no obligation to give us what we expect."
"I was never one to patiently pick up broken fragments and glue them together again and tell myself that the mended whole was as good as new. What is broken is broken - and I'd rather remember it as it was at its best than mend it and see the broken places as long as I lived."
"With enough courage, you can do without a reputation."
"Until you've lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was."

A Walk to Remember

     Love is like the wind, you can't see it but you can feel it.
     It was a lesson that I would learn in time though it wasn't Hegbert who taught me.
     Angela had done a marvelous job, I tell you. The puke was everywhere except the toilet. The walls, the floor, the sinks - even on the ceiling, though don't ask me how she did that. So there I was, perched on all fours, cleaning up the puke at the homecoming dance in my best blue suit, which was exactly what I had wanted to avoid in the first place. And Jamie, my date, was on all fours, too, doing exactly the same thing.
     As they spoke, the only thing I could think about was that scene from Julius Caesar where Brutus stabs him in the back. Et tu, Eric?
     Believe it or not, that was the first time I recognized that in some ways she was just like the rest of us.
     Do you ever wonder why things have to turn out the way they do?
     I know the Lord has a plan for us all, but sometimes, I just don't understand what the message can be.
     I don't think that we're meant to understand it all the time. I think that sometimes we just have to have faith.
     It all made perfect sense, and at the same time, nothing seemed to make sense at all.
     The problem isn't finding out where you are gonna go-its figuring out what you are gonna do once you get there that is!
     Life, I've learned, is never fair. If they teach anything in schools, that should be it.
     I'd love to, she finally said,"on one condition."
I steadied myself, hoping it wasn't something too awful.
"Yes?"
"You have to promise that you won't fall in love with me."
I knew she was kidding me by the way she laughed, and I couldn't help but breathe a sigh of relief.
Sometimes, I had to admit, Jamie had a pretty good sense of humor.
I smiled and gave her my word."
     "Do you love me?"  I asked her.
She smiled. "Yes."
"Do you want me to be happy?" As I asked her this I felt my heart beginning to race.
"Of corse I do."
"Will you do something for me then?"
She looked away, sadness crossing her features. "I don't know if I can anymore," she said.
"But if you could, would you?" I cannot adequately describe the intensity of what I was feeling at that moment. Love, anger, sadness, hope, and fear, whirling together sharpened by the nervousness I was feeling. Jamie looked at me curiously any my breaths became shallower. Suddenly I knew that I'd never felt as strongly for another person as I did at that moment. As I returned her gaze, this simple realization made me wish for the millionth time that I could make all this go away. Had it been possible, I would have traded my life for hers. I wanted to tell her my thoughts, but the sound of her voice suddenly silenced the emotions inside me.
"Yes," she finally said, her voice weak yet somehow still full of promise. "I would."
Finally getting control of myself I kissed her again, then brought my hand to her face, gently running my fingers over her cheek. I marveled at the softness of her skin, the gentleness I saw in her eyes. Even now she was perfect. my throat began to tighten again, but as I said, I knew what I had to do. Since I had to accept that it was not within my power to cure her, what I wanted to do was give her something that she'd wanted. It was what my heart had been telling me to do all along. Jamie, I understood then, had already given me the answer I'd been searching for, the answer my heart needed to find. She'd told me outside Mr. jenkins office, the night we'd asked him about doing the play. I smiled softly, and she returned my affection with a slight squeeze of my hand, as if trusting me in what I was about to do.
Encouraged, I leaned closer and took a deep breath. when I exhaled, these were the words that flowed with my breath. "Will you marry me?"
      There are moments when I wish I could roll back the clock and take all the sadness away, but I have a feeling that if I did, the joy would be gone as well. So I take the memories as they come, accepting them all, letting them guide me whenever I can.
       I do not need a reason to be angry with God.