One story

"Only the good stories have the characters different at the end than they were in the beginning. And the closest thing I can liken life to is a book, the way it stretches out on paper, page after page, as if to trick the mind into thinking it isn't all happening at once.

"Time has pressed you and me into a book, too, this tiny chapter we share together, this vapor of a scene, pulling seconds into minutes and minutes into hours. Everything we were is no more, and what we will become, will become what was."

"It's a living book, this life; it folds out in a million settings, cast with a billion beautiful characters, and it is almost over for you. It doesn't matter how old you are; it is coming to a close quickly, and soon the credits will roll and all your friends will fold out of your funeral and drive back to their homes in cold and still and silence. And they will make a fire and pour some wine and think about how you once were . . . and feel a kind of sickness at the idea you never again will be.

"So soon you will be in that part of the book where you are holding the bulk of the pages with your left hand, and only a thin wisp of the story in your right. You will know by the page count, not by the narrative, that the Author is wrapping things up. You begin to mourn its ending, and want to pace yourself slowly toward its closure, knowing the last lines will speak of something beautiful, of the end of something long and earned, and you hope the thing closes out like last breaths, like whispers about how much and who the characters have come to love, and how authentic the sentiments feel when they have earned a hundred pages of qualification.

"We only have one story, you and I, and one story alone."



-----Donald Miller, Through Painted Deserts