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.

The Notebook

   My daddy said, that the first time you fall in love, it changes you forever and no matter how hard you try, that feeling just never goes away.
   We sit silently and watch the world around us. This has taken a lifetime to learn. It seems only the old are able to sit next to one another and not say anything and still feel content. The young, brash and impatient, must always break the silence. It is a waste, for silence is pure. Silence is holy. It draws people together because only those who are comfortable with each other can sit without speaking. This is the great paradox.
   I am nothing special, of this I am sure. I am a common man with common thoughts and I've led a common life. There are no monuments dedicated to me and my name will soon be forgotten, but I've loved another with all my heart and soul, and to me, this has always been enough..
   In time, the hurt began to fade and it was easier to just let it go. At least I thought it was. But in every boy I met in the next few years, I found myself looking for you, and when the feelings got too strong, I'd write you another letter. But I never sent them for fear of what I might find. By then, you'd gone on with your life and I didn't want to think about you loving someone else. I wanted to remember us like we were that summer. I didn't ever want to lose that.
   Dusk is just an illusion because the sun is either above the horizon or below it. And that means that day and night are linked in a way that few things are there cannot be one without the other yet they cannot exist at the same time. How would it feel I remember wondering to be always together yet forever apart?
   Poetry, she thought, wasn't written to be analyzed; it  was meant to inspire without reason, to touch without understanding.
   What are we after all our dreams, after all our memories?
   I've learned that we're all entitled to have our secrets.
   But he had been in love once, that he knew. Once and only once, and a long time ago. And it had changed him forever. Perfect love did that to a person and this had been perfect.
   You can't live your life for other people. You've got to do what's right for you, even if it hurts some people you love.
   Who am I? And how, I wonder, will this story end?
   A person can get used to anything if given enough time It's the possibility that keeps me going, not the guarantee.
   We're not the same people we were then. We've changed, we've grown.
   Wandering and confused, lost to myself, ill-assorted, contradictory, Pausing, gazing, bending, and stopping.
   I'm sure you think that I don't understand what you're going through, but I do. It's just that sometimes, our future is dictated by what we are, opposed to what we want.
   If conversation was the lyrics, laughter was the music, making time spent together a melody that could be replayed over and over without getting stale.
   And I learned what is obvious to a child. That life is simply a collection of little lives, each lived one day at a time. That each day should be spent finding beauty in flowers and poetry and talking to animals. That a day spent with dreaming and sunsets and refreshing breezes cannot be bettered. But most of all, I learned that life is about sitting on benches next to ancient creeks with my hand on her knee and sometimes, on good days, for falling in love.
Everyone is always going through tough things, the irony in it is that everyone thinks what they're going through is just as hard as what you are. Life isn't about surviving this, it's about understanding this.
   I have loved another with all my heart, and for me that has always been enough.
   There's no love like the first.

Three Comrades

Life is a disease, brother, and death begins already at birth. Every breath, every heartbeat, is a moment of dying - a little shove toward the end.

He begins to notice that he has been turned out of the silent company of the trees, the animals, the stars, and the unconscious life.

For a moment I had a strange intuition that just this, and in a real, profound sense, is life; and perhaps happiness even - love with a mixture of sadness, reverence, and silent knowledge.

It was a melancholy secret that reality can arouse desires but never satisfy them.

It's only terrible to have nothing to wait for.

Nothing is the mirror in which you see the world.

Sometimes I used to think that one day I should wake up, and all that had been would be over. forgotten, sunk, drowned. Nothing was sure - not even memory.

I had the feeling of slipping down a smooth bottomless pit.  It had nothing to do with Breuer and the people.  It had nothing to do with Pat even.  It was the melancholy secret that reality can arouse desires but never satisfy them; that love begins with a human being but does not end in him; and that everything can be there: a human being, love, happiness, life and that yet in some terrible way it is always too little, and grows ever less the more it seems.

To forget is the secret of eternal youth. One grows old only through memory. There's much too little forgetting.

I wandered through the streets thinking of all the things I might have said and might have done had I been other than I was.

Sugar Daddy

Many times in life I've regretted the things I've said without thinking. But I've never regretted the things I said nearly as much as the words I left unspoken.

The span of three or four minutes is pretty insignificant in the scheme of things.  People lose hundreds of minutes everyday, squandering them on trivial things.  But sometimes in those fragments of time, something can happen you'll remember the rest of your life.

Sometimes life has a cruel sense of humor, giving you the thing you always wanted at the worst time possible.

Shock is a merciful condition.  It allows you to get through disaster with a necessary distance between you and your feelings.
 
His kisses tapped into deep mines of memory, and the years that had separated us fell away as if they were nothing."

"I guess I thought the strength of my wanting would be enough to make him appear."

She was a beautiful woman, if not a happy one, and attracting a man was never a problem. Keeping one, however, was a different matter.

As it turned out, Welcome was where I lost everything, and gained everything. Welcome was the place where my life was guided from one track to another, ending me to places I'd never thought of going.

It didn't help matters that I was shy andwore glasses. I was never one to stand out in the crowd. I liked to stay in corners. And I was happiest when I was alone reading. That and the good grades I got in school had doomed any chance of being popular with my peers. So it was a foregone conclusion that boys like Hardy were never going to take notice of me.

I had never felt the allure of another human being this strongly, warmth and curiosity mixing to form an unspoken question in the air.

When the pace of our feet matched perfectly, I felt a deep inner pang of satisfaction. I could have gone on walking like that forever, side by side with him. There had been few times in my life I had ever inhabited a moment so fully, with no loneliness lurking at the edges.

"Sadlek was right, you know," he said.
"About what?"
"I am trouble."
I knew that. My rioting heart knew it. and so did my weak knees, and so did my heatprickling stomach. "I like trouble." I managed to say and his laugh curled through the air.

Even though she assured me two people could be a family, ours didn't seem complete.

"What are their names? Psycho and Killer?"
He shook his head. "Cupcake and Twinkie."
My mouth dropped open. "You're kidding."
A grin flitted across his lips. "Afraid not."
If naming them after dessert snacks had been Miss Marva's attempt to make them seem cute, it wasn't working.

"Are you a lefty?" he asked with amiable interest.
"No. But if this hand gets bitten off, I'll still have my good one to write with."

I saw the animal's body tense expectantly as he saw the treat in my palm. Unfortunately, it seemed in question as to whether the attraction was the biscuit or my hand.

"Being afraid's not always bad." he said gently. "It can keep you moving forward. It can help you get things done."
The silence between us was different than any silence I'd known before, full and warm and waiting. "What are you afraid of?" I dared to ask.
There was a flicker of surprise in his eyes, as f it were something he'd never been asked before. For a moment I thought he wouldn't answer. But he let out a slow breath, and his gaze left mine to sweep across the trailer park. "Staying here." he finally said. "Staying until I'm not fit to belong anywhere else."
"Where do you want to belong?" I half whispered.
His expression changed with quicksilver speed, amusement dancing in his eyes. "Anywhere they don't want me."

It seemed to be a matter of general agreement that Hardy Cates was born for trouble, and sooner or later he would find it.

"Pity goes hand in hand with contempt. Don't ever forget that, Liberty. You can't take handouts or help from anyone, because that gives people the right to look down on you."

As Hardy Cates stood there looking at me, really seeing me for the first time, it felt like the whole world had been snatched up in a great unseen hand, its motion arrested.

"Am I supposed to praise you now?" I asked.br/>He retrieved the ball and dribbled slowly around me. "Yeah, now would be a good time."
"That was awesome."

Mama said if I didn't stop reading helpful quotes, she was going to come after me with a switch. I said I'd have to help her up from the sofa first

Some questions change everything.

"And you're not the kind of girl I want."
Surely he couldn't mean the fact that I was Mexican. From what I knew of Hardy, there wasn't a bit of prejudice in him. He never used racist words, never looked down on someone for things they couldn't help.
"What kind do you want?" I asked with difficulty.
"Someone I can leave without looking back."

I crossed the invisible barrier between us.

If I never have anything from him except this one moment I am going to take it. Take it now, or drown in regret later.

As with so many other aspects of our lives, we were never prepared for trouble. We just tried like hell to get out of the way when it came.

Miss Marva's driving technique was at best creative, and at worst she was an accident waiting to happen.

I loved him so much, loved his fearlessness, his strength, even the ambition that would someday take him away from me.

The feeling of relinquishing responsibility to someone else, letting him take control, was a relief beyond words.

A groundswell of silence moved between us. Trouble on the surface and even deeper currents beneath.

I closed my eyes, thinking, Let me love you, Hardy, just let me.

Bitterly I wondered if Hardy was going to overshadow every relationship for the rest of my life, haunting me like a ghost. I didn't know how to let him go. I'd never even had him.

Why is life so difficult for some people and not for others?

Why do some people have to struggle so much?

I had to let go of him. But I knew that as long as I lived, I would feel the phantom pain of his absence.

"I want you to admit just once what you feel for me. I want to know if you'll miss me even a little. If you'll remember me. If you're sorry for anything."

I knew I would replay the scene countless times in the years before me, each time thinking of different things I should have said and done.
But all I did was walk away without looking back.

The sight of a sullen teenager is common no matter where you go. Teenagers want things so powerfully and can never seen to get them, and to add insult to injury, people make light of your feelings because you are a teenager. They say time will mend a broken heart and they're often right.

When you're walking through the darkness, you can't depend on anything or anyone else to light your way. You have to rely on whatever sparks you've got inside you. Or you're going to get lost.

"Girlfriend, if you're waiting for a fairy godmother to show up with a dress and a ride, you're not going to make it to the party."

I didn't expect it was going to be easy. But hard work is a lot easier to tolerate when it's something you want to do instead of something you have no choice about.

There is no peace in poverty.

"Your legs are scratchy," she complained one night. "I like 'em smooth."
That struck me as funny. I was exhausted, worried about an exam the next day, I had about ten dollars in my checking account, and now I had to deal with a toddler criticizing my grooming habits. "Carrington. one of the benefits of not having a boyfriend is that I can go a few days without shaving my legs."
"What does that mean?"
"It means deal with it." I told her.

Long after she was gone there were moments when the child in me who wanted comfort still cried for her. And then as the grief was weathered by time, Mama slipped farther away from me. I couldn't remember the exact sound of her voice, the shape of her front teeth, the color of her cheeks. I struggled to hold the details of her like water cupped in my hands.

I didn't know how to stop wanting him. It wasn't that I had any hope - I knew I'd never see him again. But that didn't stop me from comparing every other man to Hardy and finding them all lacking. I had exhausted myself loving him, like a blackbird fighting its own reflection in a plate glass window.

Why was love so easy for some people and so hard for others?

"Something went down my throat without my permission."
"Shit." Fear wrapped around my heart like barbed wire. "What went down your throat, Carrington?"
Her face crumpled and turned red. "My lucky penny," she said, and began to cry.

Somehow I knew that no matter what I chose to tell or to keep secret, he would understand.

The freedom of saying anything to him, telling all, relieved a burden I hadn't even realized I'd been carrying. In my relentless push to keep moving forward, there had been so many emotions I hadn't let myself inhabit fully, so many things I hadn't talked about. Now I couldn't quite catch up to myself.

Being Churchill, he couldn't have taken any other road. But now that he'd finally gotten to where he'd wanted to go. he could look back and see the distant landmarks of what he'd missed.

"I have the feeling, Liberty, that you're hoping for someone to give you permission to do what you want to do."

But I think if it's the right person, you wouldn't have to work so hard at intimacy. I think, hope, it would just happen naturally.
Otherwise, opening up to the wrong<br/>person..." I made a face.
"Like putting ammo in their hands."

I never get sick. Besides, I have this compulsion to take care of ailing Travises."
"You would be the only one. We Travises are bad-tempered as hell when we're sick."
"You're not all that nice when you're well, either.

"All my relationships are short and sweet. Well.. .short, anyway.
"Mine too."
I sat in a leather chair near the sofa. It was stylish but uncomfortable, shaped like a cube and encased in a polished chrome frame. "I guess that's bad, isn't it?"
He shook his head. "It shouldn't take a long time to figure out if someone is right for you. If it does, you're either dense or blind."
"Or maybe you're dating an armadillo."
Gage shot me a perplexed glance. "Pardon?"
"I mean someone who's hard to set to know. Shy and heavily armored."
"And ugly?"
"Armadillos aren't ugly," I protested, laughing.
"They're bulletproof lizards."
"I think you're an armadillo."
"I'm not shy."
"But you are heavily armored."
Gage considered that. He conceded the point with a brief nod. "Having learned about projection in couples counseling, I'd venture to say you're an armadillo too."
"What's projection?"
"It means you accuse me of the same things you're guilty of"
"Good Lord," I said, lifting the wineglass to my lips. "No wonder all your relationships are short."

It would only lead to disappointment, even heartbreak, and her heart was too precious for me to let that happen.

I had been so naive to think that somehow we were going to visit the Travises' world like a pair of tourists, participating without becoming involved. But somehow connections had been formed, my heart had found purchase in unexpected places. I was involved more than I had ever dreamed possible.

When you love a child, you forgive her before she can even ask. Basically you've already forgiven her for things she hasn't even done yet.

"But we have to find ways of compromising when we disagree on something. You know what compromise is, right?"
"Uh-huh. It's when you don't get to have everything your way and I don't get to have everything my way, and no one's happy."

The next day I woke up in a sullen simmer, as if sleep had catalyzed my depression into a general state of pissed-offedness.

I wondered how many times in my life I had done something just because I wanted to without weighing the consequences.

That hand.
I stared at it dumbly, while the fine hairs on the back of my neck lifted.
A big hand, the nails sun-bleached, the long fingers scattered with tiny star-shaped scars. I knew whose hand it was, I knew it from a place that went deeper than memory. But I couldn't make myself believe it.
Not here. Not now.
I looked up into a pair of blue eyes that had haunted me for years. Eyes I would remember to the last day of my life.
"Hardy," I whispered.

My feet ached in my Cinderella shoes. I shifted my weight and wiggled my toes beneath the cutting Lucite straps. My Prince Charming had finally showed up, I thought wretchedly, and he was too damn late.

I'm scared of making the biggest mistake of my life. I'm just trying to figure out what the mistake is.

It's just...Hardy was always the one I was supposed to end up with. He was everything I dreamed of and wanted.But damn it, why did he have to show up when I thought I'd finally gotten over him?

"I never talked about you much." I said to Hardy. My voice sounded odd to my own ears.
Hardy stared into my eyes and nodded, understanding that some things mean too much to be expressed easily.

As we talked, I had the sense of uncovering something precious and long-buried, fully formed. Our conversation was a process of removing layers, some of them easily dusted away. Other layers, requiring chisels or axes, were left alone for now. We revealed as much as we dared about what had happened during the years that separated us. But it wasn't what I had expected, being with Hardy again. There was something in me that remained stubbornly locked away, as if I were afraid to let out the emotion I had harbored for so long. Beneath the conversations and silences and reconnecting intimacy, I tried to reconcile the adult Hardy had become with the boy I had known and longed for. It troubled me to realize they weren't the same...but of course I wasn't the same either.

It seemed important to figure out how much of the attraction I felt for Hardy came from now, as opposed to the past. If we had met now. for the first time, as strangers, would I have felt the same about him?
I couldn't have said for certain.

Our gazes met. It seemed an entire conversation took place in that one glance. Each of us saw what we needed to know.

He stared at me with bitter understanding. We both knew there was no room in this for friendship. Nothing left but childhood history.

"Be happy, honey. No one deserves it more. But don't forget... I'm keeping one little piece of your heart for myself. And if you ever want it back.. .you know where to find it."

The house is big and sturdy and charming. I know without being told that children have been born here and couples have married here, and families have argued and loved and laughed beneath the gabled roof. It's a place to feel safe in. A home.

In all my longing for a family and a home, I'd never quite been able to decide what they should have looked like. But this house looks and feels so right, so perfect, it seems impossible any other place would suit me half so well.

"I'd do almost anything for you. I think I'd kill for you. But I'm not going to comfort you while you cry in my arms over another man."

"What are you thinking?" he asks.
I know Gage hates it when I cry - he is completely undone by the sight of tears - so I blink hard against the sting.
"I'm thinking how thankful I am for everything," I say, "even the bad stuff. Every sleepless night, every second of being lonely, every time the car broke down, every wad of gum on my shoe, every late bill and losing lottery ticket and bruise and broken dish and piece of burnt toast."
His voice is soft. "Why, darlin'?"
"Because it all led me here to you."

"I'd sell my soul to have you. In my whole life, you'll always be what I wanted most."

"Darlin'...I know what you look like when you've been kissed."

And I wonder how Gage knew this is what my soul has craved. He turns me to face him, his eyes searching. It occurs to me that no one in my life has ever concerned himself so thoroughly with my happiness.

I have always hated flying. The idea of it is an affront to nature. People are meant to stay on the ground. 

Hardy was every loose-limbed cowboy in warn denim, every pair of blue eyes, every battered pickup, every hot cloudless day."

Poor people have few choices in life, and most of the time you don't think too much about it. You get the best you can and do without when necessary, and hope to God you won't be wiped out by something you can't control. But there are moments it hurts, where there is something you want in the very marrow of your bones and you know there is no way you can have it.

I thought about the future, the oceans and continents he would cross, far away from everyone who knew and loved him. Far outside the sphere of his mothers prayers. Among the women of the future, there was one who would know his secrets and bear his children, and witness the changes the years worked on him. And it wouldnt be me.

A couple of times in your life, it happens like that. You meet a stranger, and all you know is that you need to know everything about him.

... I discovered life sometimes has a way of giving you what you need, but not in the way you expect.

If loneliness was a choice, what was the other option? To settle for second-best and try to be happy with that? And was that fair to the person you settled for?

I realized I wasn't going to find a man until I was willing to expose myself to possible harm, to assume the risks of rejection and betrayal and heartbreak that came along with caring about someone. Someday, I promised myself, I would be ready for that kind of risk.

May be, Churchill had pointed out, I should stop trying so hard not to love Hardy, and accept the some part of me might always want him. "Some things," he said, "you just have to learn to live with."
"But you can't love someone new without getting over the last one."
"Why not?"
"Because then the new relationship is compromised."
Seeming amused, Churchill said that every relationship was compromised in one way or the other, and you were better off not picking at the edges of it.
I disagreed. I felt I needed to let Hardy go completely. I just didn't know how. I hoped someday I might meet someone so compelling that I could take the risk of loving again. But I had serious doubts such a man existed.

Some people there's no getting over.

I've always thought it was about finding the right person. But it's about choosing the right person, isn't it?