I miss him in so many ways, but right now I miss him in the way you always miss someone when you're single among a room full of couples.

Sweetened ice tea is one of the things I love about the South, right up there with homemade biscuits and cheese grits.

Things are what they are and there's no point dwelling in the past or wondering what could have been.

Where we belong is often where we least expect to find ourselves—a place that we may have willed ourselves to forget, but that the heart remembers forever.

Sorrow comes with so many defense mechanisms. You have your shock, your denial, your getting wasted, your cracking jokes, and your religion. You also have the old standby catchall—the blind belief in fate, the whole "things happening for a reason" drill.

I think some of the biggest time sucks are regret and guilt, and I have to fight against those things all the time. In a way, it's a good thing, because it can motivate you to make amends and forgive, but regrets are really, I think, a supreme waste of time in many ways.

Even if we no longer have much in common, we would have always had the past, which, in some ways, is just as important as the present or future. It is where we come from, what makes us who we are.