“Story of my life.”

“There was no way to take the story back, folding it neatly into the place I'd keptit all this time. No matterwhat else happened, from here on out, I would always remember Wes, becausewith this telling, he'd become part of that story, of my story, too.”

“The worst part was that I had things I wanted to tell my mother, too many to count, but none of them would go down so easy. She'd been through too much, between my siters-I could not add to the weight. So instead, I did my best to balance it out, bit by bit, word by word, story by story, even if none of them were true.”

“This true difference in me now: I had these experiances, these tales, more of this life. So maybe it wasn't the fairy tale. But those stories weren't real anyway. Mine were.”

“So much hanging on just these things, tiny increments that together build a life. Like words build a story, and what had Ted said? One word can change the entire world”

“Sitting there, watching my sister, I wondered which was harder, in the end. The act of telling, or who you told it to. Or maybe if, when you finally got itout, the story was really all that mattered.”

“There was no short answer to this; like so much else, it was a long story. But what really makes any story real is knowing someone will hear it. And understand.”