Once, she'd been a pro at decompressing, loved to sit on the back deck of the beach house in one of our splintery Adirondack chairs for hours at a time, staring at the ocean. She never had a book or the paper or anything else to distract her. Just the horizon, but it kept her attention, her gaze unwavering. Maybe it was the absence of thought that she loved about being out there, the world narrowing to just the pounding of the waves as the water moved in and out.

It was like discovering that some part of you wasn't yours at all. And it made me wonder what else I couldn't claim.

We can't expect everybody to be there for us, all at once. So it's a lucky thing that really, all you need is someone.

We didn't talk about our scars, the ones you could see and the ones you couldn't.

I wondered if it was really because he cared about me, or if now I was just another challenge.

In my group of friends, I was always the one who remembered everything. The stories, the boys my friends and I dated, all the details. So I think a part of me was always filing them away, although at the time I wasn't sure why.

Pieces and parts were always easier to process. The full picture, the entire story, was another thing entirely. But you just never knew. Sometimes, people could surprise you.