Renee Carlino

Maybe it was fate that I sat next to her that day, or serendipity, divine intervention, who knows? However you look at, I got seated next to the first girl to ever really steal my heart. I was in love from that moment on.

You can__ re-create the first time you promise to love someone or the first time you feel loved by another. You cannot relive the sensation of fear, admiration, self-­consciousness, passion, and desire all mixed into one because it never happens twice. You chase it like the first high for the rest of your life. It doesn__ mean you can__ love another or move on; it just means that the one spontaneous moment, the split second that you took the leap, when your heart was racing and your mind was muddled with What ifs?__hat moment__ill never happen the same way again. It will never feel as intense as the first time. At least, that__ the way I remember it. That__ why my mother always said we memorialize our past. Everything seems better in a memory.

It__ often mistaken for good advice, but wisdom cannot be imparted to someone. Wisdom can only be earned; it__ a by-product of experience, not necessarily knowledge, otherwise I would be stalking Oprah right now, begging for a transfusion.

And then his lips were on mine and we were in it, pulling away from the past and rushing fast into the future.

Once my grandmother told me I needed to find God and I said, __hy don__ you just tell me where to look and save me the trouble?_ I was dead serious. Faith, destiny, all the shit you can__ see, but yet people are so willing to take the leap. Not me.

We can't always control our circumstances, who are parents are, where we live, or how much money we make, but in those rare moments when we can shape our fate, when we do have the power to make our own happiness, we can't be too scared to do it.

They projected an illusion of warmth with their home-cooking and hand-stitched quilts, yet underneath the facade was an institutional rigidity, as if they were running an orphanage where children would be fed and cared for but never loved. Love was such a key ingredient in molding humans, yet it was inaccessible to kids inside of the system.

Tears had poured from her eyes without any change in her facial expression. It__ pure pain and pure surrender when your soul cries without any fight from your body and that__ how I knew she was deeply affected.

You have to teach your heart and mind how to sing together... then you'll hear the sound of your soul

Rules are for people with the luxury of time.

There will always be something a little off, but like a three-legged dog, you__l learn to walk again.

It__ the only way to know you__e really in love, when you ask the question would it be harder to watch him die, or to know he__l watch me die? Is there more mercy in being the one who does the watching or in being the one who does the dying? It__ when you realize what mercy-killing actually means, it__ when you actually care to the point of tormenting worry. It__ not roses and white horses, it__ fucking brutal and it can send a person running for the hills. To love is brave.

It was about you... what I wrote. It was all about you." His bottom lip began to quiver."I know," I said, my voice shaky. I started to cry then. There was no holding back. "I loved it, every word. It was so beautiful.