You 're so beautiful.

Something about first love defies duplication. Before it, your heart is blank. Unwritten. After, the walls are left inscribed and graffitied. When it ends, no amount of scrubbing will purge the scrawled oaths and sketched images, but sooner or later, you find that there’s space for someone else, between the words and in the margins.

And I’m okay, I really am, most of the time. But sometimes, I’m just not.

Every moment was a before and an after. Every moment was a now to be lived.

Whenever I appeared to have won an argument, Mom would say something like, 'Even broken clocks are right twice a day.

Why don't you go get in bed?" I stood, laying my hand on his chest and staring up at him. "Is that a dare?" He laid one hand over mine and pull me closer with the other. Leaning down, he kissed me gently. "It absolutely is. No falling out of it allowed, though.

No matter what grief or loss takes place, most of life flows on all around us, as though nothing's changed. At some point in our sorrow, we each make a choice to sink or swim. There's no alternative.