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| Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the
place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people
there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not
the same as never leaving.
The words ran through Tiffany's mind as she watched the sheep, and she
found herself filling up with joy-- at the new lambs, at life, at
everything. Joy is to fun what the deep sea is to a puddle. It's a
feeling inside that can hardly be contained.
"I've come back!" she announced to the hills. "Better than I went!"
A Hat Full of Sky - Terry Pratchett
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Inside
the snow globe on my father’s desk, there was a penguin wearing a
red-and-white-striped scarf. When I was little my father would pull me
into his lap and reach for the snow globe. He would turn it over,
letting all the snow collect on the top, then quickly invert it. The
two of us watched the snow fall gently around the penguin. The penguin
was alone in there, I thought, and I worried for him. When I told my
father this, he said, “Don’t worry, Susie; he has a nice life. He’s
trapped in a perfect world.”
The Lovely Bones
Alice Sebold
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He
flicks the keys on his key chain, still dangling from the ignition. "I
wish I were with you and not her." I could hit him. I have to hold onto
the edge of my seat. He says it again.
"Oh
stop it," I say. "Give me a break. You chose her. You chose her and not
me." And I make myself remember it, the three of us walking home from
Ed's van, back across the snowy field. I am angry, but also, terribly,
hopeful. I want him to tell me something now that would take away the
sting of that night, to say that really he always loved me, even then,
even when he first put his hand over his heart and asked me to repeat
her name.
"You
chose her," I say, pressing, waiting. "You act like all of this just
happened to you. Poor baby. But it's not true, Travis. You chose it."
He puts his hands over his face. "I know."
"Why?" I am crying now, though I don't want to. It's a terrible question, this why.
He looks like he doesn’t understand, squinting at me in the darkness. "I thought she was pretty."
I feel the muscles in my arms and legs tighten, closing down. "Well, she still is then. You have what you wanted."
He closes his eyes, "I know, Evelyn. I know."
The Center of Everything
Laura Moriarty
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| I
write a thank-you note to Cherylanne, and when I’m done, I lie on the
bed with a full feeling in my chest, and then I just start bawling.
It’s because I wasn’t able to say how much I love her and Belle both,
and also because I love the memory of Cherylanne and me hanging around
the PX, talking in our bedrooms, reading magazines in front of the fan
when it was too hot to be outside. It feels like now we are so much
older, and our lives are diverging like those geometry proofs where the
two lines never touch, they just keep growing farther apart. It will
never happen again that we will walk home from a movie, holding hands
with each other to be the substitute, singing “Tammy’s in love” in
soft, flirty voices. I feel like I am the mother of my own self and
Cherylanne too, looking down on us as we were then, tender in the heart
with knowing all that is to come. And all I said in the letter is,
“Thank you for the pen-and-pencil set, I will use it every single day.”
This is why I’m crying, the distance from what you feel to what you
say, how it will always be like that.
- Elizabeth Berg, True To Form | | |
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