I Survived the Blizzard of 79

We didn't question or complain. It wouldn’t have occurred to us, and it wouldn’t have helped. I was
eight and Julie was ten. We didn’t know yet that this blizzard would earn itself a moniker that would be
silk-screened on T-shirts. We would own such a shirt, which extended its tenure in our house as a rag for
polishing silver. So I didn’t make up the blizzard, though it sounds made up, the grimmest of Grimms,
windchill forty below, three feet of snow and snow still falling. You had to shovel your drive daily. Later,
a neighbor would tell of coming home after two nights away and having to dig down a foot to reach his
own keyhole.
My dad had a snow blower, which spewed sheets of snow out of the side of its mouth. Sheets became
mountains, and mountains became walls on either side of our front path, reaching almost to the sky. I could
still view sky by tipping my head back, but seeing it was no relief because the sky was snow-white, tearing
itself into pieces and hurling them at us.
And then the world began shutting down. The airports, which was bad because Mom was in Toronto,
visiting her sister. The schools, which was great for the first day, and good for the second, and then less
good and less good yet. Because the roads were impossible; the fridge, emptying. Does this smell OK to
you? Couldn’t watch Little House because Channel 5 covered the blizzard all day. A motorist, dead of
exposure in a stranded car. A man, dead of a heart attack while shoveling snow; ambulance couldn’t reach
him. Coat drive, shelters for the homeless. Check in on your elderly neighbors, folks. If you can get out,
that is. Amtrak trains abandoned. Hundreds of cars lining the highway, buried by snow, white lumps pierced
by antennas. Family of five, killed when their roof collapsed. We were a family of four, but with Mom far
away, we were only three. I got out of the bathtub to answer her crackling long-distance call.
Then it was Sunday, so Dad said get ready for mass. We didn’t question. He helped us tug and wriggle
into our snowsuits, and we slid our feet into plastic bread bags before yanking on our boots. He pushed
open the door into the shrieking tunnel of white. We trudged between the walls of snow to the unplowed
road. Follow me, Dad said. Step where I’m stepping; this part will hold our weight. Except sometimes we
couldn’t match his stride, or the snow wouldn’t hold our weight and Julie’s boot or my boot would crunch
through crust and we’d plummet to the groin, feeling nothing below but more snow. On the count of
three, Dad said, and hoisted us out, and we battled on, snow melting into our boots, heads lowered against
the wind. When we reached the plowed road, we scrambled down, easier walking. I couldn’t tell how far
we had to go. It hurt to look up.
At last, the dark church loomed. We climbed the stone steps to the doors. Locked. My father raised
his gloved fist and knocked. He must have known, even as he knocked, but still he knocked. There was no
sign on the door saying that mass was cancelled. But why should the priests post a sign? Probably they
couldn’t even get out of the rectory themselves.
Righteo, said my father, slowly turning back the way we had come. Righteo. Whatever he felt then—
gazing out over the tundra, the alien tundra, all the mailboxes and road signs and newspaper vending
machines and parking meters blighted and buried—wasn’t something he shared. What he shared was, Home
again, home again, jiggety jig.
We descended the steps, back into the scouring wind. I knew now that white hurt worse than red.
Where was everybody? Elderly couple, found in their basement, dead of hypothermia. Fourteen-year-old
boy, poisoned by carbon monoxide as he sat in a running car his dad was trying to dig out from a snow
bank. Another shoveler’s heart attack. Volunteers with snowmobiles taking doctors to hospitals.
 Every part of my body was scalding cold, but one part scalded coldest: my neck, my plump child’s
neck. The wind was wily, cupping my lowered chin and arrowing along the inch of skin before my parka’s
zipper. The wind, like a squirrel wielding knives. How much farther? I tried to step where my father was
stepping. I tried to use his body as a shield. Family of three or four, frozen dead on the road, hadn’t even
gone to mass. It was a sin to skip mass. If you were a sinner when you died, you went to hell.
Finally, I did it, the thing I’d been contemplating for the last half mile. I shouted at my dad’s back,
asking for his scarf. I didn’t want to ask. I wasn’t a child who asked. And I knew he must be cold, too. Yet
I asked, and when I did, he turned, already unwrapping his red-and-black striped scarf. He squatted and tied
it around my neck, he wound it once, he wound it twice, he wound it three times, he smiled at me, his
handsome Black Irish smile, and behind his scarf, which covered my neck all the way to the tip of my nose,
I smiled, too. And thought I might make it, after all.
Why are people nervous about becoming parents? Children are so gullible. So stupid. For years, I’d
think of this as a happy memory, my father snugging his scarf around my neck.
But eventually I corrected myself. First, I heard my parents’ late-night argument, the barb about Dad
dragging us to church in a blizzard, over two miles round trip. And in time, I recognized the catholicism of
my father’s rigidity, the Victorian strictures of our house. And eventually, I realized that if he were going
to foot-slog us through a blizzard, he should have damn sure dressed us in scarves.
And so, with each year, with each time my thoughts are blown back to the Blizzard of ’79, I unwind
that scarf, unwind its loops around my neck. With my self-pity I unwind it; with my self-righteousness I
unwind it; even with the care I take dressing my own soft children, I unwind it. The very care I take—Here
are your mittens, kitten; here are your warmest socks—is a reprimand, and then the scarf is off my neck.
Yet still I worry it: I pull out the threads, pluck and pull and release them to the wind, the wind that shall
never again find the neck of my father, my handsome father, for he is shielded from it, as he is shielded
from me, for he is below the earth and has been for years and cares not for the ways I remember him, or
remember remembering him.

Theme: Sometimes, there are memories which we keep in our minds because we think that it is a precious
memory to us. But as time passes by, as we learn more and be more conscious about life, we will eventually
realize that some of these ‘good memories’ weren’t good at all.
 Math of Marriage
By Elane Johnson
You are walking down that plushly carpeted aisle for the first time, your satin heels sinking into the
rug so that you wobble a little on your daddy’s arm, and you see through the mosquito netting of your veil
the pewter pipes of the organ, flat against the back wall like a display of rifles in a gun rack, and the looming,
gilded cross hanging in front, illuminated just right so the carved Christ, Episcopalian and clean and tidy—
not the Catholic church’s slumping, half-naked, bleeding, suffering Savior—gets most of the glory.
Suspended on wires that make Him dance, not unlike a puppet, in gusts from the central A/C, the Son of
God waits with His arms outstretched as if He’s planning to grab you when you get there. You turn your
head left and right, nodding slightly at the mayor, at some friends from high school, at some faces as foreign
to you as this thing you are about to become: married.
And, God, you want to run. You want to snatch up the hem of your swishy, off-white gown with its
seventeen layers of lace, and you want to wrench free of your daddy’s grasp, and you want to turn around
and hightail it right back down that blood-colored runner, past all those shocked stares and out those bright
red doors to your freedom. God! This is that fucking temptation you’ve heard so much about. And the
wooden Christ with His knowing gaze, with His slight smile. O! He just bobs along, nothing but taunting,
because He sees exactly what you’re going to do. You’re not going to flee. You are going to teeter on up
there and join in holy matrimony with this poor, sweet, good-hearted sap who doesn’t know the math:
thirty-one percent of marriages between college graduates aged twenty-three to twenty-eight end in divorce.
OK. That’s not so terrible. You graduated together last year in the top 3 percent of your college class. But.
People who wait until after age twenty-five to marry are 17 percent less likely to get divorced. Damn.
You’re both twenty-three. All right, let’s see . . . If your parents are still married, your risk of divorce
decreases by 33 percent. Well, that’s a wash; his parents are the ’til-death-us-do-part types, and your parents
are the kind who throw away twenty years over a drinking-directly-out-of-the-milk-jug argument. Oh. And
then this. Living together before marriage increases the odds of divorce by 33 percent. Shit. You’re doomed.
You rent separate apartments for appearances, but you’ve been sneaking around and living together in one
of them for the past year. What’s worse is all the years of sneaking around with your high school boyfriend,
the one you are dying to marry, the one you called last night, praying to the Almighty Christ that he’d agree
to run away with you so you wouldn’t now be processing to the altar with your false intentions and some
incalculable percentage of certainty that this union will not last.
Forty-four percent of first marriages end in divorce.
Check.
A couple of years after your first marriage ends, you scramble to the justice of the peace. You time
the ceremony impeccably: as soon as the last bell rings, the two of you, both teachers, squeal out of the
school parking lots—one middle, one elementary—and head for the OB/GYN’s office, where somebody
dips a stick in an inch of your pee and delivers the verdict. You’ve already lined up the judge just in case,
and after the doctor’s appointment, when you stop to fill up your fiancé’s Honda at the Shell station, you
say, “So, do you still want to go through with it?” And he does. So you do.
The judge looks at your application and says, “Ohhh. That’s not a good sign, that she’s been married
before.” He sucks something out of his teeth and squints a little at your soon-to-be, maybe kind of
encouraging him to rethink this whole thing. You’re pissed. How dare he question your commitment?
Asshole. Surely you think of this later when the ink is drying on your divorce papers, and you acknowledge
the bastard’s grasp of the math.
Up to 34 percent of second marriages for people over the age of 25 end in divorce.
Check.
Some sources posit that 73 percent of third marriages end in divorce. But this time, you ignore the
math because this time—get this!!—you’re marrying the old high school sweetheart, your one, true love,
the one who crowded your first marriage. Of course, this one is going to stick because it’s so romantic,
right? “Reunited and it feels so good,” right? What could possibly go wrong, right? Yeah. Two years later,
you’ve had your second kid and your third affair, and you’re single again.
Now, according to LegalHandle.com, a shady website that proclaims its content is for entertainment
purposes only, “93 percent of fourth marriages end in divorce within five years,” and you’re inclined to
believe it even though your own fourth marriage lasted more than fifteen. At the end of number four, you
swore you would never, ever, ever walk that plank aisle again. But here you are, happily married for five-
and-one-fourth years to lucky number five, and goddammit, you ought to be an expert by now.
His family threw a royal fit when you married, and one of his sisters declared he was going to end up
“broke and broken,” which made you kind of hate her with a white-hot passion for a while. But you’re over
it, and neither of you has anything to prove to anybody. You experience the normal ecclesiastical highs and
desire-to-strangle-you-in-your-sleep lows of marriage, and you really can’t imagine life any other way.
He’s been married almost as many times as you have, and you can both recite the agreed-upon reasons that
the marriages happened in the first place as well as the causes of their deaths. The latter are much easier to
pinpoint: infidelity, money squabbles, and disagreements over child-raising, job stress, incompatibility,
immaturity, growing apart, losing that loving’ feelin’. Those things are easy to spot. What’s confounding
is why anyone ever gets married. Anyone. For example, your official first boyfriend from third grade,
Chris—who, it turns out, liked you but actually had a crush on your dad, who looked like Mr. Brady. Yeah.
Exactly two weeks after SCOTUS’s 2015 marriage equality ruling, Chris married his longtime love,
Victor. Naturally, the Facebook announcement of their nuptials incited an outpouring of love and
congratulations, to which you added your shrieking approval. Wedding! Cake! Celebration! Kisses!
Rubbery chicken and a crappy cover band! What wasn’t to love? Now, of course, it was only fair that they
were allowed to wed, but since gay divorce rates are shaping up to be only slightly lower than those of
heterosexual couples, you couldn’t help wondering why in God’s name, after eighteen years of
togetherness, they felt the need. Was it the spousal benefits? Social conformity? The legal rights to make
end-of-life decisions or to share custody? The public proclamation that one is wanted, loved, taken? What
is it that makes people risk the financial ruin, the emotional upheaval, and the gaping wounds of probable
divorce? What is it that makes your own heart nearly burst from the utter joy of the phrase getting married,
that spurs you to get on that ride five fucking times?

The morning of your fifth wedding, an ashen first-of-January sky, low over the shallow waves of the
Atlantic, threatens to spoil your beach ceremony. Bleary-eyed at the breakfast buffet on the fourth floor of
an oceanfront hotel on Tybee Island, Georgia, with God’s view of the shore, you’re irritated, worried that
your dream venue isn’t going to pan out. You’re sipping coffee, picking at some buttery grits, when you
spot the pair of silver dolphins somersaulting out of the water. They are as mysterious and unexpected as
finding true love at forty-five, and the surprise fills you with hope. Two hours later, the sun has burned
away the gray scrim, and the ocean blurs into azure heavens, making the perfect backdrop for the ceremony.
Your minister, his hair still dripping from a morning paddle-surfing expedition, draws a gigantic heart in
the sand and positions you and your intended inside. Your family—who’ve all traveled hours and hours to
witness this joining—gather at the point, their hair askew in the salty breeze, their shoes flung off or
dangling from two fingers, bare feet barely tamping down the euphoria waiting to spill over after the I-do’s.
At half-past eleven, the minister intones, “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here in the sight of God to bless
 this union,” and you ignore all the questions, all the probabilities and uncertainties, and all the math—
except the only important equation: 1/2 + 1/2 = one.

Theme: Statistics are simply an illustrative representation of mathematical relationships. Decisions should
be made with a strong awareness of the relationships that data captures. However, data is necessary but not
a sufficient component of decision making. The story gives us the facts about the divorce rates in the world
and how terrifying it is right now. That the compromise necessary for marriage is not that simple. It requires
emotional intelligence and loyalty because it takes a serious decision to get married.

Before we’re Writers, We’re Readers

By Randon Billings Noble

For children, the world of fact is riveting. Whether they are looking at a book about polar bears in the Arctic
or watching worms wriggle on the sidewalk, whether they are learning about faraway galaxies or stargazing in the
backyard, whether they are reading a biography of Newton or noticing the way a penny sinks in a fountain, children
are fascinated by the way the world works, both in life and on the page. And sometimes their early reading has far-
reaching effects.
For me, it was The Young Detective’s Handbook, by William Vivian Butler, which had the intoxicating
subtitle Learn How to Be a Super Sleuth: Send Secret Messages, Lift Fingerprints, Create Disguises, and More .
. . . This book taught essential detecting skills, encouraged the formation of young-detective clubs to pool
knowledge and maximize crime-solving success, and combined playful exercises with real-life tales of kids who
cracked cases with little more than a pencil and their wits. It taught me, an only child with an overreaching sense
of curiosity, to be observant, to pay attention, to remember, to investigate, and to write it all down. I never forgot.
And these are the same tools I use to write creative nonfiction today.
—Randon Billings Noble

Barrie Jean Borich, author of Body Geographic

The young up-and-coming nonfiction writer, back when I was a teenager in Chicago, was daily news
columnist Bob Greene, who seemed so with-it and counterculture compared to the old-timey, hard-knock
newspaper and radio guys who’d defined the game before him. Later, Greene would be pegged a sensational
sentimentalist, even ridiculed in the even younger, even hipper alternative culture weeklies, and later still, he’d
be run out of newspaper writing altogether due to allegations pulling open the curtain on his years of sneaky
dalliances with young women—some of them aspiring journalists, at least one still a teenager. But before all that,
when I was even younger and more naïve than the girls he pursued, Greene’s columnist rock-star status must have
been what led me, an editor of my high school paper and an aspiring writer myself, to Billion Dollar Baby: A
Provocative Young Journalist Chronicles His Adventures on Tour as a Performing Member of the Alice Cooper
Rock-and-Roll Band, his 1974 participatory account of a turbulent rock band’s road show. Alice Cooper, with his
stylized violence, shock-rock drag, and snake-and-guillotine show, was too commercial, and too fake-blood
creepy, for my painterly progressive radio formations, but I read Greene’s narrative anyway, not noticing what I
might find unreadable today. (Did the author really call himself, in the title even, “provocative” and “young”?) I
was held rapt by the creative nerve of what I know now to call immersion reporting, as well as by the
interpretations of actual life he brought to the page, namely that “Alice Cooper” was not a real person but a
performance. This was one of the first times I understood how much of popular culture is not, underneath,
anything like what it seems—still news to me at seventeen—which, disappointingly, turned out to be the story of
Bob Greene himself.

Steven Church, author of the forthcoming One with the Tiger: Sublime and Violent Encounters between Man
and Animal
At the age of ten or eleven, if you’d asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would’ve probably
answered, “A river raft guide or maybe a hermit in the woods.” And if you’d asked what my favorite book was,
I might have mentioned the current biography I was reading or the novel My Side of the Mountain. Jean Craighead
George’s 1959 story of Sam Gribley, who willingly chooses to leave his large family and the hectic New York
City life to live off the land in the Catskill Mountains, ignited much of my fascination with a solitary life in the
woods. To a kid growing up in the ’70s and ’80s, such hermit dreams seemed like a perfectly reasonable response
to Vietnam, Reagan, and the nuclear arms race. Sam leaves it all behind, runs away from home and his family,
carves out a hovel in a hollowed tree, and keeps a trained peregrine falcon named “Frightful.” He eats only what
he can harvest or grow or hunt, and this seemed like a pretty good plan to me. Tree hovel in the woods? Check.
Animal for a best friend? Check. Safe from the inevitable nuclear oblivion that will strike our major cities? Check.
As I’ve since foisted the book on each of my children, I’ve found that it holds up remarkably well and even seems
ahead of its time in many ways. It’s also kind of a collage of different forms and styles, combining fictional
narration with natural history, biology, and ecology, while also mixing in occasional first-person journal entries
and field notes, even drawings and diagrams. It reads like a lyrical utopian memoir of survival and “back-to-the-
woods” philosophy, and it seems so different from the more polished, plot-heavy apocalyptic and dystopian YA
novels of today; it’s more messy and inconclusive and, dare I say, more essayistic.

Sarah Einstein, author of Mot: A Memoir

I remember reading I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, a memoir about a young woman’s early
experience with schizophrenia, in junior high school. In fact, the memory is so strong that, before I remember the
story, the first thing that comes rushing back to me when I recall the title is the sense memory of sitting in the
molded plastic chairs of our study hall. It’s an overwrought work, which was exactly what I—as an overwrought
adolescent—wanted from it, but what lingered for me after the reading was the sense of connection I had with the
author. Even at thirteen, I understood that, as a roman à clef, the book was only based on, rather than entirely
taken from, life. (I wish we would revive this generic category, because I think that if we did, we could end much
of the arguing over the boundaries of nonfiction.) Still, there was power in the knowledge that the work was
largely informed by lived experience; it created a frisson of recognition in me. I imagine it’s this same frisson of
recognition that drove the LiveJournal era, which was largely populated by other adolescent girls. In truth, when
I try to recall the book, I remember almost nothing but that electric moment of connection—I can’t really
remember the story at all—but that was enough. It sparked thirty years of reading nonfiction and then, finally, of
starting to write my own. For me, that spark, that connection, is the power of the genre.
Allen Gee, author of My Chinese-America
I was a jock as a kid, so I didn’t read much; I read a lot of Marvel comic books (I had almost a complete set
of The Avengers), which I’d buy at a newsstand not far from my grandfather’s restaurant in the Bronx, and I can
remember reading some of the Encyclopedia Brown series as well as The Hardy Boys later on. But the first real
literary book I ever sank into, got completely immersed in, was a hardback of Jack London’s The Call of the
Wild that I found in a bookcase at a rented cabin on Tupper Lake in the Adirondacks. I was twelve and couldn’t
sleep because my Uncle Dave was taking me fishing the next morning, so I ended up reading the whole short
novel—about seventy pages—in one sitting. I felt really smart, as if I’d accomplished something beyond what
was expected of me, because I didn’t have to read the book. In high school, I was put in classes called “school
level,” which meant you weren’t college bound material, so I took metal shop and considered becoming a welder.
I went to college somehow, though, and as a freshman, I read a collection of John McPhee’s writing, which was
my first real literary nonfiction book, and then I read Joan Didion’s The White Album. In my mid-twenties, when
I found Ralph Ellison’s Shadow and Act and Going to the Territory and James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son,
I discovered the kind of protest writing I’ll always aspire to. Now I can’t live without having nonfiction books to
read around me all the time.

Penny Guisinger, author of Postcards from Here

I don’t know how old I was, but one year for Christmas, my parents gave me a boxed set of Laura Ingalls
Wilder’s books. My family members were all readers: one summer, we read Where the Red Fern Grows out loud
to each other. But that boxed set stands out as this chunk of literature that was really mine. (I still have it. It’s on
my daughter’s bookcase.) I have a memory of spending an entire Saturday in my room reading Farmer Boy,
which was the longest book in the Little House series. It was the first long book I read from cover to cover in one
sitting, and I remember that joyous, sated feeling of reaching the last page: that bleary, intoxicated feeling that
only a reading binge can bring on. I don’t know if those books influence me as a writer today, but that was
certainly the day I knew I was a reader. I feel that writers are not often asked about our lives as readers, but of
course, we were all readers long before we became writers. That feeling of completely falling into someone else’s
true story is what we’re working to create for our own readers: I’m always trying to write some other
person’s Farmer Boy. I want to build that space where readers can lose themselves for a whole Saturday.

Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams

I loved Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth from its very first page: a map that showed “the lands
beyond,” the enchanted realm that a very bored boy named Milo would get to visit in his mysteriously gifted toy
car. It showed Dictionopolis and Digitopolis, separated by the Forest of Sight and the Valley of Sound, as well as
the Foothills of Confusion and the Island of Conclusions, which could be reached only by jumping. It was a world
that made its magic from humdrum things reimagined in impossibly surprising ways: numbers were mined from
mountains of rock; meals were made from edible words sold in a bustling marketplace; the Doldrums were a
place you could drive through and then (hopefully) find your way out of; time was a dog with a clock on his side;
dawn was a symphony conducted by an elaborate orchestra. It was as if the skin of the ordinary had been peeled
away to show an extraordinary machinery underneath—which is no small part of what I’ve always wanted my
own writing to do, in all the years since.
Sandra Gail Lambert, author of The River’s Memory
When I was nine, it was my job to work in the school library. They had to do something with me when the
rest of my class went to PE, and I’d already finished the correspondence typing course they’d made me take. For
that, I’d been put alone in the science room at a table that smelled of vinegar. It had felt like punishment for using
braces and crutches. Getting to hang out with the librarian didn’t. One day, she gave me a stack of biographies to
shelve. They were all bound in navy blue, and each featured a black-and-white photo of the subject as the
frontispiece. I was diligent about shelving them in the correct Dewey Decimal order until I saw the photo of
Amelia Earhart.
She wore a flapped hat, with goggles strapped over her forehead, and her eyes looked at me. They saw me. Even
before I read the book, they told me about looking down on the world from above and how the muscles around
the eyes relaxed so they could see to far horizons. I neglected my library duties in order to read about her being a
tomboy and having a sled, about how a plane spoke to her and told her to be a pilot. I read until the librarian made
me rejoin my classmates, loud and large in their bodies from jumping jacks and tetherball. I sat among them and
listened for something to speak to me. That winter, I begged for a sled. It arrived with a red bow and my name
burnt into the wood of the crossbar.
Since then, whenever Amelia Earhart is mentioned, there’s a quiet smile I make. It’s like hearing someone talk
about, unbeknown to them, your best friend. But despite Amelia, the effects of being made to sit alone in quiet
rooms, separate from the world, lingered. Thirty years passed before writing spoke to me. Amelia and I celebrated.
She told me to be large and loud.

Eric LeMay, author of the forthcoming In Praise of Nothing: Essays, Memoir, and Experiments
Today, our mail carrier dropped off a tattered copy of Cats: Little Tigers in Your House. I hadn’t seen it since
I was six, maybe seven. It recounts the birth and early development of two kittens, Toddly and Paddy Paws, from
their first moments—“Newborn kittens cannot see or hear, but they can cry and purr”—to their eventual adoption
by Sam and Dana, who pull them away in a red wagon. In between, Toddly and Paddy Paws grow, play, and
watch their Uncle Skeezix hump a scratching post. (This is not in the official narrative, but one photograph is
highly suggestive.) As a child, I must have read the story a hundred times. I can recall gazing at the shot of Paddy
Paws pouncing on string or Toddly hissing at the family dog. What drew me to their story? And why, in the nearly
forty years since, has the title stuck in my head? I recall it every time I see a cat. Walking past Petland—Cats:
Little Tigers in Your House. Watching a Purina Cat Chow commercial—Cats: Little Tigers in Your House.
Spotting a mangled tabby on the roadside—Cats . . . Cats . . . Cats . . . . Perhaps the title was my first experience
with metaphor. I can remember thinking something like, “These are tigers! In your house!” Admittedly, going
from kittens to tigers is not a big metaphoric leap, but for a child, tigers are in zoos while cats are, well, in your
house. Not that our house had any cats. Or dogs. Nope, no pets, not until I left for college and my parents replaced
me with a sickly black Lab. So, maybe Toddly and Paddy Paws helped me develop my imaginative life. In the
absence of actual cats, my book-bound pets drew me toward an adult existence where I’d come to live primarily
in and through books. Which, as I write this, sounds sad. I mean, is it so hard to let a kid have a kitten? And now
I see that Cats was published in 1974, which means that Toddly and Paddy Paws are surely dead. Which means
that, at forty-five, I am experiencing the simultaneous deaths of my first pets.
Dinty W. Moore, author, of The Mindful Writer
I lasted only twelve months in the Boy Scouts, not because I did anything wrong but because I didn’t do
anything. Didn’t tie knots, didn’t carve wood, didn’t earn a single merit badge. I was just there for the snacks. But
the book they gave me, the Boy Scout Handbook, was filled with amazing facts, like how to make a tourniquet,
how to start a fire in the woods, and how to react if a bear showed up on the trail. I never did any of these things,
but I would read about them, over and over, and imagine in my mind that I was doing them. It was one thing to
imagine myself as a Hardy boy, but I knew Frank and Joe weren’t real. This Handbook stuff was as real as real
could be. I wasn’t very trustworthy, loyal, helpful, courteous, or obedient at that age, but I was hooked. Give me
facts, not fiction.

Lia Purpura, author, of It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautiful

Though I grew up on Long Island near New York City, I very much wanted to be a farm kid, and one way I
got to be was by way of my kid-bible, the Good Earth Almanac by Mark Gregory, which is probably out of print
now. This was a kind of counterculture, back-to-the-land guide for kids, which showed how to tan hides with
acorns, cut holes in frozen lakes for ice fishing, restore health via “natural” foods and remedies, and other useful
wilderness knowledge. I loved best the survival tips (how to keep yourself from freezing/drowning should you
fall in a raging river) and survival foods (pemmican!). The pictures were hand drawn and allowed for deep
imagining into the lives of feral and independent kids (my family was way more interested in indoor pursuits, and
except for me, running and generally uncontrollable, no one really spent time outside unless they had to). This
book conjured up various dangers and edges that thrilled me, and its stance aligned so closely with the ways I
turn to the world now, as a writer, knowing the aliveness of trees, stones, mud, buzzards, and such.

Megan Stielstra, author of the forthcoming Come Here, Fear

My mother has given me many gifts. The best? A library card. She let me pick out anything, everything.
I’d show her the books, and she’d read them, too, and we’d talk about them: what I learned, what confused me,
what was new enough to sound strange. I didn’t know that some kids didn’t live with their parents until she handed
me The Great Gilly Hopkins. I didn’t know that girls weren’t supposed to go hunting until Island of the Blue
Dolphins. We read Where the Red Fern Grows, and I cried my face off when the dogs died. “It’s OK if a story
makes you sad,” she said. “It’s OK if it makes you angry. Those feelings are real. Let’s live them.” But before
that—before I could even read—there was People, by Peter Spier. I grew up in a small, sheltered town in
Southeast Michigan, everyone white and mid-middle class. At such a young age—three years old, maybe? four?—
the pictures in People cracked open the world. They showed me difference in such beautiful ways: bodies,
economics, faith, family, language, culture. I saw how we could be, inclusion as an active practice as opposed to
a talking point. It’s us, at our best.
My son is eight years old now, reading on his own. Island of the Blue Dolphins. Where the Red Fern Grows. But
before that, he had Spier’s People and picture books like it: Peopleby Blexbolex and Joelle Jolivet’s Almost
Everything. I hope they helped the world crack open.

Sue William Silverman, author, of The Pat Boone Fan Club: My Life as a White Anglo-Saxon Jew
My favorite (and the only) nonfiction book I read growing up was The Diary of a Young Girlby Anne Frank.
The theme that most profoundly affected me was her belief in the inherent goodness of people—this at the time
when she and her family were in hiding from the Nazis. When I read the book (I must have been in sixth or
seventh grade), my Jewish father was sexually molesting me. In my young mind, I felt enormous confusion about
how and where Jewish girls could find safety. Still, I held tight to her belief, which helped me survive emotionally.
Years later, when I became a writer, her diary influenced me in a different way. I realized that it’s enormously
important to tell one’s truths, even—especially—dark truths, or truths told in dark times. As such, writing from
my own place of darkness didn’t scare me as much. From Anne Frank, I also learned that all voices are important.
She was an “ordinary” girl but an extraordinary writer whose story shows the power of personal narrative. Many
important political figures wrote about the Holocaust, but Anne Frank’s voice is the one that stays with me, as it
has stayed with so many others.

Ira Sukrungruang, author of The Melting Season

I was a boy who clung to his mother’s leg, who did not stray far from the safety and comfort of her body
for fear the world would come crashing down. I was a boy who barely spoke a word of English, who barely said
a word. I was a boy born to two Thai immigrants, who raised me to be nothing else but Thai in post-industry
Chicago, where the gray of concrete was as oppressive as the winter clouds. I was a boy without siblings, and so
I found companionship in books and authors—Roald Dahl, Judy Blume, Shel Silverstein. Then I met E. B.
White—in the metaphorical sense, of course, but it was a meeting. I like to imagine E. B.—that’s what he told
me to call him—coming through the front door and parking himself in my mother’s oversized chair, which she
stole from the nurses’ dormitory she used to live in. Here was this man, out of time and place, in a thin suit and
wide tie, with a thin mustache, legs crossed, in a house with Buddha presiding above him. “Ira,” he said, “let me
tell you about a mouse.” E. B. came often, always preferring that chair. “Ira, let me tell you about a swan.” “Ira,
let me tell you about a pig and spider.” And how I listened. How I hung on every word. How every animal seemed
a form of me—who I was or what I wanted to become. E. B. knew what I needed. It was simple: a friend.

Wendy S. Walters, author of Multiply/Divide: On the American Real and Surreal

Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad by Ann Petry.
I checked this book out from the library in elementary school several times, starting in the third or fourth
grade. I don’t think I comprehended the story in its entirety the first few times I read it, but I kept coming back to
it until the details became completely clear in my mind. Petry’s portrayal of Tubman was based on fact, but the
conditions surrounding her life and journey seemed unreal—both for the magnitude of distance she crossed,
mostly on foot, from Maryland to St. Catharines in Ontario, Canada, and for the hundreds of “passengers” she
brought with her to freedom. I remember wondering how anyone could be so brave. Petry’s opening, a description
of Tidewater Maryland, left me with the sense that every geography holds a complicated history no matter how
untouched and natural it may look.

Zoe Zolbrod, author, of The Telling

I still remember how excited I was on the first day we were allowed to check out a book from the school
library. When it was time to choose, I headed to the biography shelf, as my mom had suggested I do when I was
planning my strategy the night before. I’d already read so many novels, she noted. Why not use this opportunity
to try a new form? But when the librarian made last call, I was still in the stacks, feeling confused and let down.
A voracious reader of cereal boxes when there was nothing else on hand, I’d thought anything in print would
provide fodder for me, but none of these books looked very good. They appeared to be a set, all clothbound with
black silhouettes of their subjects screened onto the covers—and all, apparently, about men. I grabbed the only
tome that looked like it had potential. The figure squinting off toward a distant shore had an undeniably masculine
profile, but the fancy hat and poufy costume allowed me to convince myself that the person’s gender was
indeterminate. Maybe I was holding a book about a strong-jawed, sea-faring lady.
I wasn’t. Standing in line to get my book thumped, I turned to the title page and saw I had chosen a volume about
William Penn. (In that author’s telling, not an interesting character.) The next week, not giving up on biographies,
I again followed my mom’s suggestion and told the librarian what I was looking for: something about a girl. She
showed me the three biographies of women in the library’s collection: Betsy Ross, Florence Nightingale, and
Molly Pitcher. In a few weeks, I read them all. Molly Pitcher was my favorite. By the time I graduated from that
school, I’d read her biography several times. How did it influence my writing? It’s hard to be sure, but I still like
to read and write about women doing things.

Theme: there is always that one specific thing which led us to what we are today or we’ve become or wanting
to become. And as for writers, there will always be that one book/story which led and inspires us to write.

A Story We Tell Ourselves and Others

By Randon Billings Noble

Here is one story I tell about marriage: for a long time, I thought I’d never get married. In high school, I
made snarky plans for a joke wedding. I picked the most hideous prom dresses from Seventeen for my bridesmaids
and decided my reception dinner would be a pile of Happy Meals, topped off with a Carvel Fudgie the Whale
cake. In college, I wanted to be Frida Kahlo to a (more faithful) Diego Rivera, Edna St. Vincent Millay to a Eugen
Boissevain; I imagined a separate-but-together union—two houses connected with a bridge or one house divided
into two wings. I could embrace the idea of intense attachment. But marriage? Ha.
Here’s another story: the man I would marry and I had our first conversation about marriage in a car, late at
night, driving on a dark highway through West Virginia, looking out only at what the headlights showed, not
meeting each other’s eyes, as if we were suspended from our own reality. The next day, we stopped at a letterpress
stationery store, and our eyes met over a table of wedding invitations. Our expressions didn’t change, but a flicker
of understanding passed between us. A year later, he proposed during a spring snowstorm in the Bishop’s Garden
of the National Cathedral, and I said yes.
There are multitudes of stories in this sentence: we’ve been married for ten years.
It’s often said that no one really knows what goes on inside a marriage except for the people who are in it—
and I would argue that sometimes they don’t know, either. It takes a certain kind of honesty—and bravery—to
talk (let alone write) about the inner workings of one’s own marriage. Perhaps for this reason, most of the stories
we hear and read about marriage are told by outsiders, writers of fiction or biography who stand removed from
its core.
But I suspect nonfiction can get us closer to the fascinating questions at the heart of any marriage—why two
people come together, why one might stray, why one might stay, and why, in some cases, the couple splits. Six
recent books of creative nonfiction meet these challenges full on. They tell courtship stories, marriage stories,
stories of affairs and divorces. But what I found most interesting about these books is that they also tell stories
about storytelling itself, thinking hard about the way we think, talk, and write about marriage—to ourselves, to
each other, and to others.
Clancy Martin’s Love and Lies: An Essay on Truthfulness, Deceit, and the Growth and Care of Erotic
Love explores the way we lie in our closest relationships: as children, as parents, as lovers, as spouses, and even
to ourselves. Martin describes his book as “part memoir, part self-psychoanalytic analysis, part philosophical
argument, and, because many of the most fascinating lovers are in literature, part literary criticism”—all
marshaled “in defense of lies in the service of the truth.” He claims that “this fact about love—that from one
moment to the next the lover experiences so many different degrees and even kinds of certainty, uncertainty, self-
awareness, and self-doubt—is what makes speaking about ‘truth’ and ‘transparency’ . . . in love so dubious.”
Instead of sticking to the cold, hard truth, Martin suggests, we should think about marriage as “a terrific novel a
couple is writing together,” and he points out that we often turn to fiction to help us make sense of the facts of
our own lives (although he reminds us that the fiction he quotes—Turgenev’s First Love, Goethe’s The Sorrows
of Young Werther, Joyce’s “Araby,” and Proust’s story of Marcel and Albertine—is loosely autobiographical).
But Martin is not advocating for hurtful lies. Instead, he quotes Adrienne Rich, who claims that “an
honorable human relationship . . . is a process . . . of refining the truths they can tell each other.” Martin elaborates:
“It is not an out-and-out lie, but it is a kind of creative approach to the truth that recognizes the frailty of love—
and of the human psyche, of what we can bear to hear, especially from someone we love—and embraces the idea
that what we are really saying is different from the actual words we are speaking.” There is still a connection—a
shared language—that bonds the couple, even if the words are not always strictly true.
But sometimes that language—and with it, the bond—fractures. Benjamin Anastas’s memoir Too Good to
Be True is about his many failures: financial, authorial, and matrimonial. The first line of the chapter “The Real
Life of an Author,” which focuses on his marriage, sets the stage: “I lost my wife in a glass elevator at the Hilton
in Frankfurt, Germany.” The loss actually happens before he is married, when he falls in love with another woman
and enters the elevator that will take them to his hotel room, where they will consummate their affair. He writes:
“The story I told myself was simple: that love operates without reason. That it was foolish to try to understand it,
or to pretend that I could control how it arrives or the hour it escapes.” He could love his fiancée, and he could
love this other woman, too, “with a different fervor, in the time we had together.” But he cannot quite believe his
own story.
At first, he decides to lie to his fiancée, and his lover agrees: it would be cruel to tell her. But his resolve
quickly falters: “Tell her, I’d admonished myself every night for weeks. Just tell her. Until I did.” And this is the
beginning of the end for a marriage that hasn’t even started yet. The story he told himself can’t be sustained—but
the secret can’t either; one story eclipses the other. They marry, but then the couple separates, and the wife begins
an affair of her own. Against his wishes, she ends the marriage, and he struggles to understand his actions, how
he was at fault, but she was, too.
Later, Anastas wonders, “How much of our lives do we write, and how much of them are written for us?”
This is a question that many writers—especially those writing about marriage—grapple with. In his essay
collection My Wife Wants You to Know I’m Happily Married, Joey Franklin agrees with his wife: he is happily
married. No affairs have shadowed their union; no outright lies have weakened it. But even he acknowledges that
the truth in marriage isn’t absolute: “[T]hese stories we tell each other, no matter how close to the ‘truth,’ still
rely on selective and often unreliable memory; they’re still just snapshots that can never tell the whole experience.
They’re fish stories without witnesses.” He goes on to tell a “fish story” about his own marriage:
It was love at first sight. . . . I say, “I knew it the moment I saw her.” This is all true, of course, and yet I
wonder how our story has been shaped by its outcome. . . . How different would my version of this story
have been if we’d broken up after only a few weeks? Would it have been a story at all?
 Franklin recognizes that the truth of the story depends on the context that surrounds it, as well as what is left
unsaid. He goes on to confess that much is often left unsaid; we curate our stories about marriage for our families,
the other parents at our children’s schools, the person we joke with in the check-out line, our real-life friends, and
those more tenuously connected online. Franklin admits:
Any public retelling of our story usually fails to include doubts Melissa and I both felt just a few months
after our wedding, that hollow fear that we’d made a mistake, as if the rightness of our decision needed
more validation than the fact that we’d made it, wide-eyed and hopeful. But doubt we did, and sometimes
still do, based, I think, on an unhealthy assumption that out in the universe there lies some right path for
us to walk, a story already written instead of one that is ours to create every time we rise with the sun.
Instead of passively giving in to the stories that surround us, he insists it “takes courage to suggest that we are
more than just storytellers and that we have a responsibility to the truth.” And part of the truth of marriage is
doubt.
Even in an essay called “This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage,” from Ann Patchett’s collection of the same
name, there is doubt. When a young friend tells Patchett, “Write down how it is you have a happy marriage,”
Patchett begins in an unlikely place: “[D]ivorce . . . every single thing about it starts there. Divorce is the history
lesson, that thing that must be remembered in order not to be repeated. Divorce is the rock upon which this church
is built.” After describing her grandparents’ and parents’ divorces, she tells the story of her own first marriage,
how when her fiancé pulled out an engagement ring it was as if he had “pulled a knife,” how “every week, every
day that [she] stayed with him, [she] compounded [her] mistake.” Finally, a friend asked a question that changed
Patchett’s thinking: “Does your husband make you a better person?” Within days she left him, taking that essential
question with her.
And it is that question that brings her, years later, to the happy marriage of the essay’s title. Even after
spending eleven years with a man she considers her mate, she is reluctant to marry again. She doesn’t doubt her
partner as much as she doubts the institution of marriage; she feels divorce is inevitable. But when a health scare
makes it look as if he will leave her not by choice but through death, “everything stops, and that is the moment
of change.” They marry quietly, and she discovers “he actually loved me more than he had previously led me to
believe. . . . It was simply a bigger love than I had imagined.” It is this love that makes her answer the
question Does he make you a better person? With a resounding yes: “And that is what I aspire to be, better, and
no, it really isn’t any more complicated than that.”
But sometimes it is more complicated than that. Love and marriage don’t always make one a better person—
sometimes love and solitude do. On the very first page of Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own, Kate Bolick lays
out a truth to be universally acknowledged: “Whom to marry, and when will it happen—these two questions
define every woman’s existence. . . . [They] govern her until they’re answered, even if the answers are nobody
and never.” It seems as if Bolick’s answers will be “nobody and never.” Using the life stories of five women she
calls her “awakeners” (Edna St. Vincent Millay, Maeve Brennan, Neith Boyce, Edith Wharton, and Charlotte
Perkins Gilman), Bolick rejects what she sees as the “confinement of matrimony, a promise that life will work
out just the way we want it,” in favor of a more honest and authentic life. Reading through her own diaries, she
sees a pattern—a “spinster wish” (her “private shorthand for the novel pleasures of being alone”) expressed over
and over again, which makes her wonder if, in spite of the happy and frequently fulfilling relationships she’s had,
she would be better off alone. Invoking Vivian Gornick on independence—“The idea of love seemed an invasion.
I had thoughts to think, a craft to teach, a self to discover. Solitude was a gift. A world was waiting to welcome
me if I was willing to enter it alone”—Bolick sees a single life as being deeply connected with a creative one:
“Being single is like being an artist . . . because it requires the same close attention to one’s singular needs, as
well as the will and focus to fulfill them.” Her awakeners “were showing me how to think beyond the marriage
plot” and into a different way of living, where, as Carolyn G. Heilbrun describes in Writing a Woman’s Life, a
“woman may write her own life in advance of living it.” Indeed, through reading others’ stories and writing her
own, Bolick explores and fulfills her spinster wish.
Jay Ponteri, author of Wedlocked: A Memoir, has similarly ambivalent feelings about marriage but writes about
them with a rare and raw honesty: “To write close to my private life, to speak openly about my feelings, and to
do so uncloaked, as an essayist, as one who attempts (but fails with dignity) to understand is to tear through the
fabric of this very real silence.” Part of what this silence hides is
a marriage’s daily mechanics, its habits and rituals, its meaningful and deleterious expressions, its
omissions, its caverns, its rooftop views, how it reaches up to the light and lies in dreamy shadow at night,
all [of which] remains hidden from view and what others do see is an illusion of a surface (a not-surface)
made of their own distorted projections of what their marriage should or shouldn’t be.
Ponteri is trying to see what marriage—specifically, his marriage—actually is, without distortion or projection or
any of the comforting falsehoods that Clancy Martin describes in Love and Lies. Instead, he tells the stark truth
about his struggles with intimacy, with commitment, and with his own fantasized adultery—“its red rise of
emotion and its coital current, its identity recalibration and shared secrecy.” But he sees adultery as something
more than an animal transgression; instead, he thinks “the adulterous act is a characteristic (rather than a symptom)
of a larger identity recalibration, enacting a person’s complicated desire to be known differently than he or she
feels known inside of his or her marriage.” And that is a desire that fuels his writing, first contained within a
manuscript kept hidden in his garage and then let loose on the world in the form of this book. But more than a
book, Wedlocked feels like an ongoing quest for answers that may never be found. Ponteri writes:
Even though I write a combination of memoir and essay, the truth is I fabricate brief instances, exaggerate
dramatic encounters, and amplify (thus distort) discussions with my various selves, digging for what I do
not know, like I do not know how two people can sustain a marriage over a lifetime or how and why we
give up erotic love for companionship or why, just as I’ve created something meaningful and, dare I say it,
healthy, I punch the self-destruct button or why erotic love, once consummated, begins to vanish or why
the best sex I’ve ever had is in my head.
Whatever their stories, I suspect all of these writers—from the most cynical to the most naïve, whether settled or
struggling or struggling to settle—would agree with Franklin when he concludes:
I think it’s possible that the story of every good marriage is built on [a] kind of hyperbole, a series of well-
spun yarns that remind us why we’re together, that help us reaffirm we’ve made the right choice—that the
person we wake up to each morning is really the person we want to wake up to.
Psychologists call this confirmation bias.
Poets call it being in love.

Theme: Nonfiction can get us closer to the fascinating questions at the heart of any marriage—why two people
come together, why one might stray, why one might stay, and why, in some cases, the couple splits.
 Let me explain "Love"

Love isn't please stay a little bit longer

but you should go home, your parents will be worried
Love isn't stay up late with me until morning
but please rest, take care of yourself
Love isn't please don't leave me, I need you
but please go if you need to
Love isn't I will never hurt you
but I’m sorry I won't do it again
Love isn't I love you because, I love you if
but nonetheless I love you
Love is goodbye take care
not I’ll die if you leave me
Love is don't skip your meals, stay hydrated
not you should lose or gain weight because I like you better like that
Love is take your time
not what took you so long
Love is tell me what's wrong babe
not uh-oh here we go again
Love is I got home safe don't worry
not jeez I’m home now can you stop blasting my inbox
love is “aww come here you need a hug”
not “okay sure fine” (then a cold shoulder)
Love is a lot more than words
a lot more than actions
You can say it and not mean it
Just as you can make it be felt and never confirm it
Love is more than I love yous
More than hugs and kisses
Love isn't always loud
Sometimes it can also be silent and distant
Love is funny, a bit annoying yet amusing
and a whole lot more
but love should always echo respect
for your partner and of course, yourself
with all that said,
I love you, okay?

Theme: People sometimes misinterpret and tend to misconceptualize the meaning of love. Well, as long as you
care for someone, it means you are looking out for their safety and not just your own happiness. It’s a sacrifice
and battle between what you want and what he/she needs to.

You
Imagine this:
You're 21.
It's a few minutes past noon but you just woke up. You're on your bed, stinking of your four-day old soiled
clothes. Your mouth aches from multiple blisters that developed. Possibly from biting too hard, too often. Possibly
from skipping the brush for too long.
You get up. You hand-brush your bristly hair, attempting to at least make it look decent, but failed. You light
your almost-too-bent cigarette. You make yourself a coffee. You eat food that's left-over from last night.
You go back and check your room. It looks the same as always. Or at least same for the past couple of months.
Your bed is a mess. In the corner of your room is also a heaping mess of dirty laundry. How long has it been now?
Three months of not washing your clothes. Around your room are scattered pieces of paper, scattered clothes
which you're not even sure if they're used or not. You shrug.
You go out of your room. You lie on the sofa and you get your phone. Lighting another cigarette, you scrolled
through social media.
Shit.
Shit.
Another shit.
Oh well, no good news online.
You drop your phone. You rummage through your left pocket. None. Right pocket, you grab something. A bill
enough to buy you some more cigs and a coffee. Nice.
 Fast-forward through the day which you slept on despite drinking three mugs of strong coffee in the morning.
Or noon, sorry. You check the time: 10 o'clock. You grab and massage your head lightly. Your head aches because
of oversleeping, which you're actually used to right now. You grab another cigarette and another mug of coffee,
then you go outside to sit on your comfortable hammock. You look up and see no stars, just a sky full of thick
clouds, blocking the astral view.
You bow down looking at your mug, take a huge hit off your ciggarette, exhale, and then chuckle. "Damn, the
sky's rough tonight. Just like my life." After that statement, you gather yourself and starts to walk towards the
door. Then you hear a rumble, and drops fall.
Drops.
Both from the sky and from your eyes.
You ask yourself, "What am I doing with my life?"
With no hurry, you start walking towards your room. Upon arriving, you lay down, crying. It felt never ending.
You check the time again: 3 o'clock. Your pillow is stained and wet with tears. How long have you been crying?
Just a couple of hours, but it seemed like years.
You flip your pillow, lie on your side and started with your mantra:
"I am fine. Everything's fine.
I am fine. Everything's fine."

You say this repeatedly until you fall asleep.

You wake up on your study table with a crumpled paper in your right hand. You check the time:
it's a couple of minutes past noon.

You read the paper in your hand. Its first line stated, "Imagine this."

Theme: In life, we might think that were losing ourselves in order to complete our tasks. But in reality, there will
be many hindrance in stepping our goals in life, more importantly, it’s much worth it when we know that we work
on it. It’s not about the destination, but actually the journey. It’s not bad to overthink, what’s wrong is that we let
our mind eat our system.
 Repetition

Someone once told me, "If you keep on repeating the word, it will lose its meaning, it will become nothing,
because you'll become used to it." So, countless times, I kept on telling myself, "I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm
fine, I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine," and he was actually right, because "fine" lost its meaning while
I continued making myself believe that I am fine. And I continued using the secret that he has taught me; every
time that someone leaves, I tell myself they are not a loss, "it's not my loss, it's not my loss, it's not my loss, it's
not my loss, it's not my loss, it's not my loss" I will not stop repeating the word until I fool myself. Until I believe
the word and become used to it.
Then you came, and made me forgot about the mechanics of the game. You always tell me you love me, "I
love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you," and I never got used to it. Every
time that you say those magic words I always got stunned. It never loses its meaning.
Now, every I love you have different meaning, and it made me want to hear more, and more, and more, and
more, and more, and more.
But, you also know the secret,
the word will lose its meaning
when you keep on repeating it
"I love you"
"I love you"
"I love you"
"I love you"
"I love you"
"I love you"
Until the word
lost its meaning,
until it became nothing,
because you don't
mean it
anymore.

Theme: It’s good to always repeat something inside our mind, it is a big help in order to remember a thing. But
there’s a difficulty in repetition. We became uses to it, until it lost its meaning. The lesson here is, just
remember it every time. Don’t be used to it, it’s more special if you always mean it.
 The Question

"How long are you going to wait?"

"Everyday—
Until my heart stops beating his name."

Theme: There will be time in our lives wherein we will wait for something or worst for someone then we will
wait until we can but the saddest part is that, we will get tired of waiting up until our hearts will be the one who’ll
surrender on it.

My Star and My Moon.

Somewhere along the way, we will meet someone who can drastically change our life from despair to a
beautiful disaster. Someone who will teach us a lot in life –on how perception on things can change you, on how
not to give shits on other's opinion, on how decisions can make a big impact in the future, and on how we stand
up after life downfalls.

Someone who will make us cry in anger, fear, sorrow, and sadness –but also someone who can make our
heart skip a beat, who give us stomach ache because of real laughters, who creates a satisfying sweetness that we
carry every day, and who makes our mind calm when we are sober. Someone who will hate us for being who we
are – but also somewho who stays in spite of that feeling, who knows when to crawl beside us when things get
rough, who always tell us how wonderful we are, and who loves us despite of the flaws he sees, the faults you
made and the imperfection you carry.

Someone who forgets his promises –but also someone who will make it up for you to not feel neglected,
someone who will make your friends' jealous because he bring flowers, who will keep your photographs and let
his friends see, and willingly take places you want to go. Someone who sometimes disapprove your point of views
–but still listens to every single thing you want to say, who shares his dreams and goals for the both of you, who
pushes you hard to the finish line you are always aiming for, and who gives you inspiration in whatever you do.

Someone who wants to leave – but chooses to stay.

Theme: There will be time in our lives wherein we will fall for someone but sadly, we can't be with them as
long as we want to. They aren’t for us. We have to indulge our love, soon. As of now, we have to leave
everything behind and just continue growing.
Theme: People sometimes misinterpret and tend to misconceptualize the meaning of love. Well, as long as you
care for someone, it means you are looking out for their safety and not just your own happiness. It’s a sacrifice
and battle between what you want and what he/she needs to.