The truth was, I wasn't sure. But I wanted to keep believing people could change, and it was certainly easier to do so when you were in the midst of it.

I wondered if he ever thought of me, and hated the pang I felt when I told myself he didn't.

That was the thing. You never got used to it, the idea of someone being gone. Just when you think it's reconciled, accepted, someone points it out to you, and it just hits you all over again, that shocking.

Events conspired to bring you back to where you'd been. It was what you did then that made all the difference: it was all about potential.

I would have thought this would make me feel better.. getting to be the one to leave and not the one left behind. But it didn't. Not at all.

The best gifts come from the heart, not the store.

Whenever you made a choice, especially one you'd been resisting, it always affected everything else, some in big ways, like a tremor beneath your feet, others in so tiny a shift you hardly noticed a change at all. But it was happening.