If You Come Softly

Time comes to us softly, slowly. It sits beside us for a while. Then, long before we are ready, it moves on.

I think only once in your life do you find someone that you say, "Hey, this is the person I want to spend the rest of my time on this earth with." And if you miss it, or walk away from it, or even maybe, blink - it's gone.

He wondered where that stuff went to, where love went to, how a person could just love somebody one day and boom –- the next day love somebody else.

Fifteen. Sixteen was probably something, but fifteen - fifteen was a place between here and nowhere.

I'm gonna kiss you in each room," he said. "Then it's dinnertime." "How many rooms to this place?" Ellie asked, her eyes wide. Miah shrugged. "I'm not counting.

I don't know," he said softly. "I look into the future and I don't see anything else. It's like it's this big blank space where I should be.

I would never trust her. Not one hundred percent. Not the way some people can trust their mothers.

In our yearbook, there is a picture of me and Miah - sitting in Central Park - Miah has his lips poked out and is about to kiss me on my cheek. And I'm looking straight into the camera laughing. Two and half years have passed, and still, this is how I remember us. This is how I will always remember us. And I know when I look at that picture, when I think back to those few months with Miah, that I did not miss the moment.

This is how the time moves - an hour here, a day somewhere, and then it's night and then it's morning. A clock ticking on a shelf. A small child running to school, a father coming home. Time moves over us and past us, and the feeling of lips pressed against lips fades into memory. A picture yellows at its edges. A phone rings in an empty room.

If you come as softly as the wind within the trees. You may hear what I hear. See what sorrow sees. If you come as lightly as threading dew, I will take you gladly, nor ask more of you.

Thing about white people," Jeremiah's father tells him, "they know what everybody else is, but they don't know they're white" - "Maybe some know it" His father eyed him and smiled "When they walk into a party and everyone's black, they know it. Or when they get caught in Harlem after nightfall, they know it. But otherwise...

And sometimes,' Anne said softly, 'there's just plain love, Ellie. no reason for it, no need to explain' Then she leaned back on the couch, crossed her ankle over her knee and grinned. 'Perfect love,' she said. 'And what's that like?' 'When you find it, lil sis. You'll know.

Chapter 1 JEREMIAH WAS BLACK. HE COULD FEEL IT. THE WAY THE sun pressed down hard and hot on his skin in the summer. Sometimes it felt like he sweated black beads of oil. He felt warm inside his skin, protected. And in Fort Greene, Brooklyn—where everyone seemed to be some shade of black-he felt good walking through the neighborhood. But one step outside. Just one step and somehow the weight of his skin seemed to change. It got heavier. Light-skinned