Real friends were the kind where you pick up where you'd left off, whether it be a week since you'd seen each other or two years.

Do you know how hard it is to say nothing? When every atom of you strains to do the opposite? I had practiced not saying anything the whole way from the airport, and it was still nearly killing me.

So this is it. You are scored on my heart, Clark. You were from the first day you walked in, with your ridiculous clothes and your bad jokes and your complete inability to ever hide a single thing you felt.

I chose to believe that God, a benign God, would understand our sufferings and forgive us our trespasses.

Just hold on. Just for a minute." "Are you all right ?" I found my gaze dropping towards his chair, afraid some part of him was pinched, or trapped, that I had got something wrong. "I'm fine. I just...I don't want to go in just yet. I just want to sit and not have to think about...I just...want to be a man who has been to a concert with a girl in a red dress. Just for a few minutes more.

We are all part of some great cycle, some pattern that it was only God's purpose to understand.

I held him close and said nothing, all the while telling him silently that he was loved. Oh, but he was loved.