Love with someone else, an actual person, was another matter. People got hurt doing that. People cried and wrapped their arms around themselves and rocked with loss. Loving words got turned to fierce, sharp, whip-cracks of anger that lefft permanent marks. At the least, it disappointed you. At most, it damaged you.

You can forget that other people carry pieces of your own story around in their heads. I've always thought--put together all those random pieces form everyone who's ever known you from your parents to the guy who once sat next to you on a bus, and you'd probably see a fuller version of your life than you even did while living it.

Each story, good and bad, short or long-from that trip to the mall when you saw Santa, to a long, bad illness-they are all a line or a paragraph in our own life manuscript. Two thirds of the way through, even, and it all won't necessarily make sense, but at the end there'll be a beautiful whole, where every sentence of every chapter fits.

Maybe we all just wanted someone to believe in. That's all each of us wanted, and it should be so simple, but it never was simple.

...forever is hard enough without it beginning now.

I'd always thought telling the truth to other people was hard, but maybe that was a snap compared to telling the truth to yourself. Sometimes we just refused to know what we knew.

It’s a simple truth that a secret is something you’re ashamed of.