There comes a time in every life when the world gets quiet and the only thing left is your heart.

With my mom, when someone was gone, they were gone. She didn't waste another minute thinking about them, and neither should you.

Once, this had been the life I’d wanted. Even chosen. Now, though, I couldn’t believe that there had been a time when this kind of monotony and silence, this most narrow of existences, had been preferable. Then again, once, I’d never known anything else.

This is the problem with dealing with someone who is actually a good listener. They don’t jump in on your sentences, saving you from actually finishing them, or talk over you, allowing what you do manage to get out to be lost or altered in transit. Instead, they wait, so you have to keep going.

Who knew three dots could make such a difference? Like everything else, a love or a wish or whatever, it was all in the way you read it.

"It's gonna be okay," I said. It was the first time in a long time that I believed it. "It will."

When I was in high school, I was always really envious of those girls who seemed to have everything: the perfect hair, perfect clothes, perfect boyfriend, perfect life. It wasn't until I was older that I realized that nobody's life is perfect, and that those girls probably had a lot of the same problems I did.