Molly O'Keefe

You__e not broken, Dylan. I know you__e not.

Sometimes, maybe we don__ know exactly what we have until someone shows us.

It__ about his family. It will always be about his family. And himself. Deep in your heart you know that and you__e trying to convince yourself that you can save him. And you can__. There__ no saving Dylan Daniels.

She was saying words she didn__ totally believe yet. And maybe I was, too. But I wanted them to be true. For the first and only time in my life, I wanted to belong to someone and have that person belong to me.

I just realized, baby, right now, thinking of how I could take this pain away from you, I just realized that you have to feel it. You gotta make your way through all the bad stuff to get to the good.

I loved books. Loved reading. It not only gave me an escape from my own world, but opened a door into other worlds. It allowed me, at the beginning of my marriage, to suffer with some grace. As long as I had another world to go to, what did I care about how small and strange and terrifying my own life had gotten?

It's funny what memory does, isn't it? My favorite holiday tradition might not have happened more than once or twice. But because it is such a good memory, so encapsulating of everything I love about the holidays, in my mind it happened every year. Without fail.

After church on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, my family would go chop down our Christmas tree. Once it was home and placed in its stand, Mom and I would painstakingly decorate our tree. It took hours to place the tinsel, string the lights, find the perfect spot for my favorite macaroni and felt ornaments from kindergarten.

In college - while figuring the things out that most people do in college - I had no game. No confidence. I had Birkenstocks. And overalls. A budding romance novel addiction. But no cool. No poise. I was trying on a thousand different personalities, but a lot of them were formed by the perceptions of others.