"Any life will seem dramatic if you omit mention of most of it."
I will be sure to remember this if anyone ever asks me my life story.
The second half of the piece after the huge paragraph is the part that really hits home. The first part, I know, is necessary. It's the part where the speaker is falling in love, living out those unique experiences that lead to the not so happily ever after. The not so happily ever after is the really beautiful part, because it's so sad and so relate-able. I think maybe as a society we thrive on those sad endings because we all know that life isn't always made up of happy endings. We've all had our own fair share of sad endings and we're selfish so we want to know that other people out there are having them too because if we can't live happily ever after then no one else should get to, either.
"Somebody grew up, fell in love, and spent a winter with her lover in the country."
Three things happen here - in case you didn't notice. Somebody grew up. Somebody fell in love, and somebody spent time with the person they loved.
That somebody spent a winter - just one winter - with her lover in the country, and that implies that the love story had a time frame and did not go on forever. That fact certainly is sad. The falling in love part isn't really that sad, depending on who you are and what your viewpoints on love are. The line "somebody grew up" is the one that twists the little knot of emotion located somewhere in between our hearts and stomachs that the anatomy books fail to mention.
Looking at the word somebody, the reader can put themselves into the shoes of the speaker, because it's so universal. And everybody grows up. But tying the two lines of growing up and falling in love together makes the impact so much greater, because now we're imagining a little girl in a princess outfit playing with dolls and making up stories, stories of how one day her prince will come. And well, when she grew up, he did, but it ended. I think when people talk about falling in love they imagine two older mature people living out their lives. But that's not it at all. We're all still just the little kids we once were, waiting for the stories we made up to come true. Back then we didn't know there were other things than happy endings.
"Who expects smalls things to survive when even the largest things get lost?"
Because when we grow up we're so busy in the ups and downs of the grown-up world that we forgot the dreams that we had when we were young.
"People forget years and remember moments."
Twenty years from now I'm not going to say "I remember the exact date and year we carved our names into a tree in my favorite park," I'm just going to remember that it happened, and it meant something to me. That's why people forget their anniversaries - it's not like they don't remember their wedding, it's just the timing of it that's not as important as we think. We don't think in linear thoughts. We think in feelings and color and sounds and not always with our heads, but with our hearts.
There's nothing I can say about this next one that's going to be better than what it already says, so I'll end with:
"Love, in its shortest form, becomes a word."
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