From Forever SAM. Without Grace, I lived in a hundred moments other than the one I currently occupied. Every second was filled with someone else's music or a book I'd never read before or work or making breakd -- anything to fill my head. I played ceaselessly at normalcy, at the idea that it was just one more day without her and my family and that the next morning would be her walking through my door and life going on as it hadn't been interrupted. Without Grace, I was a perpetual motion machine, run by my own inability to sleep and my fear of letting my thoughts build up in my head. Every night was a photo copy of every day that came before it and every day was like the night that was like the day beofre. Again and again and again. Everything felt so wrong, the house full to the brim with Cole St. Clair and no one else; my memories edged with images of Grace in her own blood, shifting into a wolf; and over all of it, me, unchanging, my body out of reach of the seasons. I was waiting for a train that never pulled up at the station. But I couldn't stop waiting, because who would I be then? I was looking at my world in a mirror. Rilke said: This is what Fate means: to be opposite, to be opposite to everything and nothing else but opposite and always opposite. Without Grace, all I had of her were the songs about her voice and the songs about the echo left behind when she'd stopped speaking. And then she called. Excerpted from Forever by Maggie Stiefvater All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
