Sarah Ockler

“They don't want to know that you'll never eat birthday cake because you don't want to erase the magical taste of frosting on his lips. That you wake up ever day wondering why you got to live and he didn't.”

“Chocolate Cherry Fixer-Uppers”

“Blackthorn? Please. Shut. Up." I grab the collar of his jacket and pull him into me, answering every last protest with a kiss- a real one, deep and intentional.”

“Because I realized I was falling for another guy, fifty-six.”

“But once in a while, you pick the right thing, the exact best thing. Every day, the moment you open your eyes and pull off your blankets, that's what you hope for. The sunshine on your face,warm enough to make you heart sing.”

“The first moments of being awake are neutral, as they always are, waiting for us to assign memory and meaning from the day before.”

“The late-night backyard encounter and kiss induced insomnia.”

“The whole idea of losing one's virginity is kind of ridiculous. To lose something implies carelessness. A mistake that you can fix simply by recovering the lost object, like your cell phone or your glasses. Virginity is more like shedding something than losing it. As in, "Don't worry, Mom. You can call off the helicopters and police dogs. Turns out - get this - I didn't actually lose my virginity. I just cast it off somewhere between here and Monterey. Can you believe it? It could be anywhere by now, what with all that wind.”

“Hey. What did you do to your - I mean, you look different." My cheeks go immediately hot. Not that your average onlooker can tell, given all the makeup I'm wearing. "Frankie and I were just messing around this morning." "Oh," he says, tying the paper from his straw into little knots. "It looks nice, I mean. I just can't see you, that's all." I make a mental note to ditch the makeup tomorrow. Then I get mad at myself for letting some boy that I just met dictate what I do with my own face. Then I get mad at myself for getting mad at myself and remember that I, too, prefer the natural look.”

“...while well-meaning relatives and friends stopped by, bearing an endless supply of cards and food in disposable foil pans and saying all the wrong things. "He's in a better place now." "God must have a plan for him." "At least he didn't suffer." "You're still young, Jayne. Maybe you can have another child." "You'd stop thinking about him if you took down his pictures.”

“I closed my eyes under the fluroescent lights and tried to make another birthday wish, a onetime do-over, a rebate, a trade-in on the kitchen sink kiss that started everything, offered up for just one last miracle.”

“I wonder how many loose buttons there are in this world, just rolling around in a jar without a mate or a blouse to go on. No purpose. Just siting there unnoticed. Forgotten.”

“I'm not sure if you even want me around or if you just feel sorry for me. I'm not sure of anything.”

“But then I realized that I was holding on to something that didn't exist anymore. That the person I missed didn't exist anymore.People change. The things we like and dislike change.And we can wish they couldn't all day long but that never works.”

“Sometimes life rocks so hard your heart wants to explode just because the sun came up and you got to feel it on your face for one more day. ...Sometimes you get the bitter end instead.”

“What good are all those bits of nostalgia when the one thing that truly holds you to a place - the one thing that really makes it home over any other dot on the map - crumbles?”

“We can get used to just about anything but it doesn't mean it's okay”

“He read with intensity and was passionately in love with every character, every turn of plot or twist of language. He made the characters come alive for us, like he wasn't reading a work of fiction but telling stories about his own friends.”

“The only thing that's ours to accept is the fact that we don't always get to know the answers.”

“But I don't know how to speak the language of impossible dreams en français.”

“Tonight, when Frankie sits at the table and innocently knocks over her glass of Diet Coke, Aunt Jayne starts to cry, and the translucent veil of general okayness evaporates to reveal the honest, ugly parts underneath.”

“I used to think certain people in my life were the real deal. That we'd stay tight forever.”

“...if I let him walk away now, we'll forever be a "just"; Just hockey player and skating coach. Just music swappers. Just friends. A not-quite-almost whose time passed through as quickly as the train, fading into the distance before it even had a real chance at staying, at becoming something more, because I didn't speak up.”

“No one wants to do it with a chick who smells like bacon." Her brow creases. "Everybody loves bacon.”

“-Wait, Anna, do you hear it? Listen""-What is it?" It sounds like barking."-Look- seals." She points about thirty feet down the share where a dozen or so brown lumps wriggle and play in the sand, barking like some kind of water dogs, "-Wow", I breath. "I'm changing my answer.""Anna, What's the number one coolest thing you've ever seen in your life?" He asked me on night, about a week after my birthday, when We saw three shooting stars in a row behind his house. It was after midnight, and everyone was asleep but the crickets. I remember telling him about this crazy lighting storm I saw when I was ten. It was far away but I could see the rain billowing out in sails and sheets, all the dark blue-gray sky lit up in flash after flash after flash. "What's yours?" "It's always been the ocean. but I'm thinking about changing my answer." He didn't say anything after that. He just looked at my eyes for a long, long time, missing all the stars above Us until it was too light to see them anyway. "-What answer?" Frankie asks."-Seals. The seals are officially the number one coolest thing I've ever seen in my life.”

“When it's like this, I don't notice the cold. I don't hear the wind howling through the empty spaces. I don't feel like a small, broken-winged bird trapped in a rusty cage.”

“When you're out here alone, contemplating all the things you didn't do and the person you didn't become ... if you think about it too long a hush seeps into the gray space, and the wind will hollow out your bones, and the purest kind of loneliness comes up from the inside to swallow you like an avalanche.”

“No powdery residue. But definitely suspicious. Smell." He slides a makeup catalog from beneath a microscope made out of a plate, a toilet paper roll, and an intricate arrangement of pipe cleaners. "Any ideas?" I take a scientific whiff. "Gardenia. Looks like those Mary Kay terrorists are at it again.”

“All the little quirks that make even the most barren, frigid places beautiful, that make a tiny gray dot on the map the one place you'll always call home, no matter where your glamorous, boring, adventurous, average, ridiculous, impossible, epic, romantic, bacon-infused life leads you.”

“No matter what happens next, I'm not letting this turn into another two weeks of silence, the entire history of us summed up in a series of near misses and almosts just because neither of us had the snowballs to say anything.”

“Abby's my sister, Hudson. We're twins.""Oh thank God! I mean thank God... that you... have a sister... what a special... um, napkin?”

“Anyway, what about you? How's, um, Abby? Angie? What's her name?"Oh, Hudson. Your suavity is an example to us all.”

“Why did he leave so fast at the end? Who was on the phone? A girl? That's it, he must have a girlfriend. One from another school. One he was just about to call so he could propose to her, but I interrupted, and then he had to run off to take her call, because weddings don't just plan themselves, you know.”

“I think you're beautiful," an old man at the counter - one of our Sunday night fixtures - says...."You passed the Earl test," she says as she pours him a fresh cup."Ma, he says that to anyone who still has their own teeth. No offense, Earl.""None taken," he says. "But you got your own hair too, so you're twice as pretty.”

“What do you need, Josh? Just name it. Anything. I'm totally here for you. I knew I could count on you, Hudson. The thing is... I don't know if I'm a good kisser. It's not the sort of thing you can figure out on your own, you know? So I was thinking, if it wouldn't be too much trouble, maybe you could kiss me, everyday for a year, and then you can..."Hudson?”

“What's up?" Need a kidney? Two of them? Where do I sign? I grab my pen again, just in case.”

“Maybe he's just... craving the meatloaf?"Dani hops off the counter and gives me the once over. "Craving the meatloaf? Is that what the kids are calling it now?”

“My entire life has changed in the span of three weeks, but as the seals howl against the Pacific, everything around me remains exactly the same.”

“I just want to be floating, suspended here in my California time capsule with neither yesterday's dusk or tomorrow's dawn anywhere on the horizon.”

“Would 'sorry' have made any difference? Does it ever? It's just a word. One word against a thousand actions.”

“Whenever we’d pass a penny on the sidewalk, Matt wouldn’t touch it. ‘Let someone else have a lucky day,’ he’d say.”

“Explanations take the mystery out of things, right?”

“They say true genius often strikes in the pale moments between awake and asleep.”

“It's rally bad when dads cry.”

“According to the crazy, bug-eating guys on those survival shows, human beings are the most adaptable creatures on earth- we can get used to just about anything. Doesn't mean it's okay. I mean, who wants to get used to eating grubs and collecting maple leaves for toiler paper? No thanks.”

“See, some people politely encourage their tone-deaf friends to sing. Some people even convince them to go on live television and audition for national competitions. But me? I am not that friend.”

“I've never met a problem a proper cupcake couldn't fix.”

“I remember the feeling even now; an inescapable stickines of each other like magnets on the fridge. It's funny how someone can be such an integral part of your life, like you laugh at the same jokes and eat your ice cream cones the same way and share your toys and dreams and everything but your heartbeats, and then one day - nothing. You share nothing. It's like none of it ever happened.”

“Aunt Rachel says tahat the universe is always trying to speak to us, and that the universe doesn't waste time speaking about things that aren't within our direct power to influence or change. But if that's true, the universe needs a better signal.”

“Frankie was so mad that she threw my journal into the bottom of the ocean where it is banished for all eternity with a lovesick mermaid who cries out pieces of sea glass. Are you going to eat that bacon?”