August.08
"Time Passes
There will be other lives.
There will be other lives for nervous boys with sweaty palms,
for bittersweet fumblings in the backseats of cars, for caps and
gowns in royal blue and crimson, for mothers clasping pretty
pearl necklaces around daughters' unlined necks, for your full
name read aloud in an auditotorium, for brand-new suitcases
transporting you to strange new people in strange new lands.
And there will be other lives for unpaid debts, for one-night
stands, for Prague and Paris, for painful shoes with pointy
toes, for indecisions and revisions.
And there will be other lives for fathers walking daughters
down aisles.
And there will be other lives for sweet babies with skin like milk.
And there will be other lives for a man you don't recognize,
for a face in a mirror that is no longer yours, for the funerals of
intimates, for shrinking, for teeth that fall out, for hair on your
chin, for forgetting everything. Everything.
Oh, there are so many lives. How we wish we could live them
concurrently instead of one by one by one. We could select the
best pieces of each, stringing them together like a strand of
pearls. But that's now how it works. A human's life is a beautiful
mess.In the year Liz will turn thirteen again, she whispers in
Betty's ear, "Happiness is a choice."
"So, what's your choice?" Betty asks.
Liz closes her eyes, and in a split second she chooses.
Five years pass.
When one is happy, times passes quickly. Liz feels as if one
evening she went to bed fourteen and the next morning she
woke up nine."
-excerpt from the book elsewhere by Gabrielle Zevin
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