Lauren Miller

Someday those bruises inside you will heal. You can't know when someday will come, or what life will look like when it finally does. ... But in a way it doesn't even matter because someday isn't what we have. What we have is right now, this moment, when things aren't okay yet, but in a way they are already, because in the end they will be, and as long as that's true, it's enough.

The delicious, semiconscious, edge-of-wonderland kind of sleep, where I'm awake enough to control my dreams but asleep enough to forget that I'm doing it.

That's the funny thing about life. We're rarely aware of the bullets we dodge. The just-misses. The almost-never-happeneds. We spend so much time worrying about how the future is going to play out and not nearly enough time admiring the precious perfection of the present.

So you believe in fate,_ I say.Dr. Mann pauses thoughtfully before answering. __ believe each of us was uniquely created for a specific purpose designed by the Creator, and that, because of that, there are certain things in our lives that we are destined by Him to do. The rest, I think, is soft clay: left entirely to the defining influences of choice, chance, and circumstance. And luck! Don__ forget luck.

We see what we want to see, what we expect to see, instead of what's really there. I don't think we do it on purpose, most of the time. We just get kind of stuck. We start thinking that the way things are is the way they'll always be. But that's not true. It can't be true. Because the world is never still.

Your path will change. Your destiny never will.""But what if I'm on the wrong path?""There is no wrong path. Not when it comes to destiny. There are only detours, you see.

Brokenness is just like beauty; it's something we wear and carry, and if we let it define us, it will. But we are not our beauty or our brokenness, because souls are not made of beauty or brokenness. Souls are made of something permanent. Souls are made of truth.

It registers that I am sitting there topless, but this body I am in doesn't feel like mine anymore so the half-nakedness seems irrelevant, like a rumor, something I'm supposed to care about but don't.

Over and over again, the same message, 'you are not enough'. You hear it enough times and it weaves itself into you, and it's not an idea any more it's who you are, 'not enough.' But then a boy comes along and changes the message. 'You are enough,' he says, 'enough for me.' And because he is all you have, being enough for him is enough for you, too, even though you know deep down that 'good enough' really just means 'pretty enough,' and if he really knew you, all of you, he'd bail, too.

The fear, though, is unassailable. The dark balls of dread pinball through my brain. This is what anxiety does to a brain, I know that. A barrage of intrusive, unwanted, and distressing thoughts that the person thinking them can't turn them off no matter how hard they try...

This probably isn__ something you__e supposed to say at a moment like this, but I think the moon is seriously overrated._ A moment like what? I bite my cheeks, taming the grin that threatens to take over my face.__nd the stars?_ I ask, once the smile is under control.__ildly underrated,_ he declares with a grin. He looks up again. __he sky is a storybook,_ he says then. __very constellation__ like its own fairy tale.