You're not the kind of person who smiles for nothing, Colie. I have to earn every one.

But you only get so many do-overs in this life, so many chances to, if not change your past, alter your future.

There's just something obvious about emptiness, even when you try to convince yourself otherwise.

Yes, it sucked getting dumped. But wasn't it better to just be brutally honest? To admit that your feeling for someone is never going to be powerful enough to justify taking up any more of their time? I was doing him a favor, really. Freeing him up for a better opportunity. In fact, I was a practically a saint, if you really thought about it. Exactly.

No matter how much time has passed, these things still affect us and the world we live in. If you don't pay attention to the past, you'll never understand the future. It's all linked together.

Like it takes so little not only to change something, but to make you forget the way it once was, as well.

It wasn't until Kiffney-Brown, when I met Jason Talbot, that I really thought I might actually have one of those boyfriend kind of stories to tell the next time I got together with my old friends. Jason was smart, good-looking, and seriously on the rebound after his girlfriend at Jackson dumped him for, in his words, 'a juvenile delinquent welder with a tattoo'.