Carrie Ryan

I realize that sometimes death comes before you expect it. That while we are rarely prepared for our friends, family and loved ones to die, we are never prepared for our own deaths. Never prepared to reconcile our own regrets.

It's as if there is infinity between our lips and we will never actually touch. Like math, where dividing by half can last for eternity.

You think you want love, Mary. You think it is this beautiful gift that does nothing but fill you and make you whole. But you are wrong. Love can be cruel and ugly. It can become dark and cause the deepest pain.

It's funny, most people think that revenge is a passionate affair, driven by rage and pain. But it can't be. Feelings such as those make you weak. They overwrite thought and cause reckless impulses that lead to poor decisions.

The living used to wonder what happened after death. She said that whole religions were born and evolved around this one simple uncertainty.

There is a child - a baby - who long since kicked off her blankets. Her skin is ashen and her mouth open in a perpetual yet silent scream. She isn't old enough to roll over, to sit up, to climb. So she lies there kicking her fat legs against the footboard of the crib, eternally calling for her mother. For food. For flesh.

Do you still believe that if you truly want something enough it can happen?" I ask. I think of all the times I wanted to stop the world from spinning, all the times I wanted to go back and start over again. All the things I've wanted to undo or take back. Did I not want them enough?

Knowing that this is what it means to live. That this love, this need is what drives us to push and fight and build and grow. That as long as there's hope and love in this world, there will always be the living.

If your friend really cared about you he wouldn't let you take such risks.

Survivors aren't always the strongest; sometimes they're the smartest, but more often simply the luckiest.

Who are we if not the stories we pass down? What happens when there's no one left to tell those stories? To hear them? Who will ever know that I existed? What if we are the only ones left -- who will know our stories then? Who will remember those?

It wouldn't have mattered if they were scratches or not," he says, his voice like liquid. "I was bitten during the escape from the house." My limbs go weak, everything inside me folding in collapsing on itself."I was already dead," he says, opening his eyes.

We're both just human. Nothing more. But also nothing less.

I know in my life there have been breaches, but I also know that I am very good at blocking out the memories that serve me no purpose.