Sarah Dessen - This Lullaby (2002)

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Well," I said finally, knowing he was waiting, "you make me laugh." He nodded. "And?" "You're pretty good-looking." "Pretty good-looking? I called you beautiful." "You want to be beautiful?" I asked him. "Are you saying I'm not?

Sarah Dessen
I am not breaking my rules,' I snapped, hating that I'd ended up on the advice-recieving end of things, jumping from Dear Remy to Confused in Cincinnati all in one summer.

Sarah Dessen
N the dark everyone felt the same: the edges blurred. When I think of myself then, what I was like two years ago, I feel like a wound in a bad place, prone to be bumped on corners or edges. Never able to heal.

Sarah Dessen
Closed my eyes and listened. It was like music I'd heard all my life, even more than "This Lullaby." All those keystrokes, all those letters, so many words. I brushed my fingers over the beads and watched as her image rippled, like it was on water, breaking apart gently and shimmering before becoming whole again.

Sarah Dessen
But for now, I just sat there on the bed and listened to my song. The one that had been written for me by a man who knew me not at all, now sung by the one who knew me best.

Sarah Dessen
This Lullaby is only a few words, a simple run of chords, quiet here in this spare room, but you can hear it, hear it, wherever you may go, even if I let you down, this lullaby plays on...

Sarah Dessen
I'd seen another shade of him, and if it had been light where we were now, he'd have seen the same of me. So I was grateful, as I had been so often in my life, for the dark.

Sarah Dessen
I didn't trot my pain out to show around. I kept it better hidden than anyone. I did.

Sarah Dessen
What did it feel like, I wondered, to love someone that much? So much that you couldn't even control yourself when they came close, as if you might just break free of whatever was holding you and throw yourself at them with enough force to easily overwhelm you both.

Sarah Dessen
The lizard stared up at us, and we stared back, taking each other in. He was little and defenseless, I felt sorry for him already. This was a screwed-up place he'd just come into. But he didn't have to know that. Not yet, anyway. There in that room, where it was hot and cramped, the world probably still seemed small enough to manage.

Sarah Dessen
That was the nice thing about the Spot: you could hear everything, but no one could see you.

Sarah Dessen
I drove off, with my friends watching me go, all of them grouped on Lissa's hood. As I pulled onto the road, I glanced into the rearview and saw them: they were waving, hands moving through the air, their voices loud, calling out after me. The square of that mirror was like a frame, holding this picture of them saying good-bye, pushing me forward, before shifting gently out of sight, inch by fluid inch, as I turned away.

Sarah Dessen
I eased back on my elbows, tilting my head back to look up at the sky, which was pinkish, streaked with red. This was the time we knew best, that stretch of day going from dusk to dark. It seemed like we were always waiting for nighttime here. I could feel the trampoline easing up and down, moved by our own breathing, bringing us in small increments up and back from the sky as the colors faded, slowly, and the stars began to show themselves.

Sarah Dessen
I have boobs!" Chloe said again, a bit too loudly— she'd already had a couple of mini bottles at the Spot. "My boobs are great, goddammit. You know that? They're fantastic! My boobs are amazing.

Sarah Dessen
But against love, the case was solid. Easily argued. And you could, indeed, hold it in your hand.

Sarah Dessen
Lissa lowered her voice and added, "I might not even go to school anyway. I might defer and join the Peace Corps and go to Africa and shave my head and dig latrines." "Shave your head?" I said, because, really, this was the most ludicrous part of the whole thing. "You? Do you have any idea how ugly most people's bare heads are? They've got all kinds of bumps, Lissa. And you won't know until it's too late and you're flat-out bald.

Sarah Dessen
Some things don't last forever, but some things do. Like a good song, or a good book, or a good memory you can take out and unfold in your darkest times, pressing down on the corners and peering in close, hoping you still recognize the person you see there.

Sarah Dessen
She fell, she hurt, she felt. She lived. And for all the tumble of her experiences, she still had hope. Maybe this next time would do the trick. Or maybe not. But unless you stepped into the game, you would never know.

Sarah Dessen
As if he was beating me to the punch, his words living forever, while I was left speechless, no rebuttal, no words left to say.

Sarah Dessen
But even more so, it reminded me that this was all really happening. Stanford. The end of the summer. The beginning of my real life. It was no longer just creeping up, peeking over the horizon, but instead lingering in plain sight.

Sarah Dessen
I was heading off to my new world. But I was taking a part of my past, and the future, along with me for the ride.

Sarah Dessen
As if at the age of eighteen life already sucked beyond any hope of improvement.

Sarah Dessen
Whenever you made a choice, especially one you'd been resisting, it always affected everything else, some in big ways, like a tremor beneath your feet, others in so tiny a shift you hardly noticed a change at all. But it was happening.

Sarah Dessen
But I think, personally, that it would be worse to have been alone all that time. Sure, maybe I would have protected my heart from some things, but would that really have been better? To hold myself apart because I was too scared that something might no be forever?

Sarah Dessen
It was a basic plot in any number of her books: girl strikes out, makes good, finds love, gets revenge. In that order. The making good and striking out part I liked. The rest would just be bonus.

Sarah Dessen
If what you're asking is how I debated whether or not to love her the answer is I didn't. Not at all. It just happened. I didn't ever question it; by the time I realized what was happening, it was already done.

Sarah Dessen
Because you have to just go with the flow. Your life is not your own, with people coming in and out all the time. You get mellow because you have to.

Sarah Dessen
That's what this has been all about for you, correct? Make it clear. That you and me—it was nothing more that you'll have with Spinnerbait boy, or the guy after that, or the guy after that. Right?" "Yeah, I said, shrugging. "You're right." He just stood there, looking at me, as if I had actually changed before his eyes. But this was the girl I'd been all along. I'd just hidden her well.

Sarah Dessen
I planned my whole future around Adam," she said now, quietly. "And now I have nothing." "No," I told her, "now you just don't have Adam. There's a big difference, Lissa. You just can't see it yet.

Sarah Dessen
He'd always had that fearless optimism that made cynics like me squirm. I wondered if it was enough for both of us. I would never know from here, though. And time was passing. Crucial minutes and seconds, each one capable of changing everything.

Sarah Dessen