Boy Toy

See, forgiveness doesn't happen all at once. It's not an event -- it's a process. Forgiveness happens while you're asleep, while you're dreaming, while you're inline at the coffee shop, while you're showering, eating, farting, jerking off. It happens in the back of your mind, and then one day you realize that you don't hate the person anymore, that your anger has gone away somewhere. And you understand. You've forgiven them. You don't know how or why. It sneaked up on you. It happened in the small spaces between thoughts and in the seconds between ideas and blinks. That's where forgiveness happens. Because anger and hatred, when left unfed, bleed away like air from a punctured tire, over time and days and years. Forgiveness is stealth. At least, that's what I hope.

Anger and hatred, when left unfed, bleed away like air from a punctured tire, over time and days and years. Forgiveness is stealth.

We can know what love is. It´s adults who have forgotten, so they cling to their poor substitute and yell at kids who dare to live with real love. Pure Love. Love without compromise or distraction.

. . . but there's a restraining order in place.' She speaks slowly, choosing her words carefully. 'I'm not supposed to be this close to you.' You were never supposed to be this close to me,' I say, and I have no idea why.

I do what I've trained my whole life to do. I watch the ball. I keep my eye on the ball. I never stop watching. I watch it as it sails past me and lands in the catcher's mitt, a perfect and glorious strike three.

It's not an easy choice, but that's OK. Easy doesn't equal good. Difficulty doesn't equal bad. It's just life, is all.

Josh Mendel has a secret. Unfortunately, everyone knows what it is.

Maybe Rachel was right all along. Maybe the past is past, history is history, and you just push it aside and look for the future.

We can know what love is. It’s adults who have forgotten, so they cling to their poor substitute and yell at kids who dare to live with real love. Pure love. Love without compromise or distraction. Hell, when you’re a kid you’ve got all the energy and all the free time in the world. You’ll never have the chance to devote more to love ever again in your life.

Look, my dad has a saying - we'll burn that bridge when get to it. OK? You get it? Worry about tomorrow, tomorrow.

Here’s the thing about baseball-it’s not the individual sport I thought it was. Turns out I was wrong about that. Yeah, the batter is a lone man against the world. He stands in the batter’s box like a soldier and it’s up to him-and him alone-what happens next. But here’s the thing I didn’t understand until I was forced to, until recently: In order to hit a home run… Someone else has to pitch the ball.

And it's true. It's so true. All those years of loving Zik because he never asked about Eve... I never realized, I never understood. It was his job as my best friend not to ask. But it was my job as his best friend to tell him without being asked.

Don't be stupid. You're a child. You don't know what it means to be in love." And she flung open the car door as if she wished she had the strength to rip it from the hinges, and stalked off to the house through the rain. That night, I lay in bed, troubled by what she'd said, blocking out the sounds of argument from my parents' room. Was love what my parents had? Yelling at eachother, worrying about money? Never smiling? Never happy? If that was love, then I didn't want it.

You don’t break up with someone just because of an argument, Josh. At least, I don’t.

And I think of nothing. I think of nothing but Rachel. What happens next is pure magic, and is for us and us alone.

Unreal. I'm feeling nostalgic for something that happened less than twenty-four hours ago. This has got to be a record.

Homecoming's stupid." And it is. Buch of kids looking for excuses to grope eachother all night.

Cars are little privacy cocoons that we take with us. If you could refuel while driving you could, theoretically, stay moving forever.

You don't swing at any pitch. You swing at the ones you can hit.

At the end of the day, it's a series of individual challenges played out against a team defense. It's a psersonal test every time I step into the batter's box: Can I do better than the last time? And that's why I love it.

Someone's on the rag," she chides, then grabs her crotch as if adjusting a cup. "And it's not me.

He fucked my wife!" George wailed. "He ruined my life!" "Your wife was a goddamn whore!

Zik spits into the dirt in from of home plate, his own little ritual. He digs in and grits his teeth, snarling at the Heat. Psychology. Baseball's all about psychology.

But it's high school. It's not real love, or at least you can't be sure it's real love. Real love is messy and complicated and brutal. It's been tested. Zik and Michelle have never been tested by anything mroe than being separated by a couple of classes.

In baseball, when you get into the batter's box, that's it. It's just you. It's one man against the world. All that matters in that moment is your individual achievement and your individual skill. There is literally nothing that anyone else on your team can do for you. Hell, they're all sitting on the bench, waiting to see what happens, just like the fans in the crowd! It's just you and your bat. And the ball.

It's just a base hit, people. It means nothing unless we put a string of them together.

The world is large,” said Okonkwo. “I have even heard that in some tribes a man’s children belong to his wife and her family.” “That cannot be,” said Machi. “You might as well say that the woman lies on top of the man when they are making the babies.

I usually tug my helmet's brim once, then push it back up into position, but I'm not wearing a helmet. I'm embarrassed to find myself miming the action through sheer muscle memory.

My heart went into triple time, like that burst you get when you realize the ball is going over the heads of all the outfielders.