You don't get to choose if you get hurt in this world...but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices.

They were angry, I thought. Horrified. These teenagers, with their hormones, making out beneath a video broadcasting the shattered voice of a former father.

He missed his imagined future.

The book was turned to the page with Anne Frank's name, but what got me about it was the fact that right beneath her name there were four Aron Franks. FOUR. Four Aron Franks without museums, without historical markers, without anyone to mourn them. I silently resolved to remember and pray for the four Aron Franks as long as I was around.

And then something invisible snapped insider her, and that which had come together commenced to fall apart.

To be abandoned like that! Shut out when you most need to be loved.

At least it was instant. At least there wasn't any pain." I knew he was only trying to help, but he didn't get it. There was pain. A dul endless pain in my gut that wouldn't go away even when I knelt on the stingingly frozen tile of the bathroom, dry-heaving.