The Truth About Forever

This week in my summer Shakespeare class that I am teaching, we talked about marking up a book.  The basic idea was that you want to write all over the margins, and we read an article about it and had the students respond to the article by doing just that.  I have one student in this class who is a proficient reader (I mean really, sometimes we have to prevent him from reading books so he'll get what he is suppose to done).  As we read the article, he jotted down more notes than most of my other students but one note that he wrote down keeps haunting me.  "Not while I'm free reading."  While true, most of us are not going to circle parts of speech or write a summary of what we just read to help us study for a test, but we do respond to what we read--whether subconsciously or consciously.  This blog post is dedicated to him, because I just finished one of my all-time favorite books and though I checked it out from the library and could not write in it: I have a response. 

It is funny how so much of our lives our connected to what we read.  I started reading this book (The Truth About Forever by Sarah Dessen) again because another student of mine happened to start reading it out of our school library and I have enjoyed discussing it with her.  However, it reminded me how much I don't remember the little details.  Then as I read it (almost all of it today--oh Sundays are so much better with an afternoon for reading) and I realized that it connected with a conversation I had just had earlier today.  I was talking to someone about their concerns with life, and how everything is so up in the air.  She has just moved to a new town, and is feeling quite out of her element.  She left behind a boyfriend, amazing friends, basically a second family to go and live on her own to fulfill her life-long dream.  As we were talking she said something like I keep living in the past and looking forward to the future.  In my head, I kept trying to figure out how to help her live in the moment though the moment sucks, dizzying, stressful, and all around impossible. (Even though I've been there, and did the exact same thing and to an extent still do.)  As I read the closing lines of this book, I realized that this was the answer: "But there was only one truth about forever that really mattered, and that was this: it was happening."  No matter how crazy life can get, we need to take it all in.  And to my lovely reader student who thinks you can't write in a free read book: that's what I would have written after underlining that line.