The past did affect the present and the future, in ways you could see and a million ones you couldn't. Time wasn't a thing you could divide easily; there was no defined middle or beginning or end. I could pretend to leave the past behind, but it would not leave me.

An ending was an ending. No matter how many pages of sentences and paragraphs of great stories led up to it, it would always have the last word.

I didn't want to talk about what happened, so it seemed safest not to talk at all.

I'm sorry," I heard him say again. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a sudden blur of movement as he slid out of his seat, left some bills for the breakfast he wouldn't eat, and walked away. And as he did, I thought again of those mornings in the hallway at school, way back in ninth grade. Everything had started in such sharp detail, each aspect pronounced and clear. Obviously, endings were different. Harder to see, full of shapes that could be one thing or another, with all the things that you were once so sure of suddenly not familiar, if they were even recognizable at all.

She stroked my hair and told me I was beautiful, but I was old enough by then to know not to believe it anymore.

If you didn't love him, this never would have happened. But you did. And accepting that love and everything that followed it is part of letting it go.

It's all in the view. That's what I mean about forever, too. For any one of us our forever could end in an hour, or a hundred years from now. You never know for sure, so you'd better make every second count.