Novel & Cerita The Wasted Ten Years

“You don't call the shots here.” Jackson began pacing, hands in his hair. "Then you're throwing away ten years of your life!" Jackson's control shatters. The words pour out. "Ten years, Kai. Ten years since your own father sent you out to earn the right to come home, and you’ve clawed your way back from nothing. Don’t throw it away now.”

Every time I have to refer to her by that title, it hurts so much. Page after page, line after line. All of it was his hidden and raging love for Rachel. He’d loved her long before Alex ever did, long before he loved me, and long before these ten wasted years of our marriage. When I met Samuel, Alex was already gone. I knew nothing about the past. So… Samuel had lied to me for ten whole years. How many ten years does a person get in life to waste like this... I could not read another word as I snapped the diary shut. I then picked up my phone and started to dial a familiar number. I wanted to demand answers. I wanted to ask what these decades meant.

Chuck Have you ever stopped to wonder if you let life pass you by? I've had thirteen years to wonder about that. I thought I wanted freedom. I thought I wanted to be single. But what do I have to show for it? A big, fat zero. I thought the world was my oyster back then. I rode the waves of freedom, going everywhere and doing everything I ever wanted. But it seems so hollow now, looking back on it.

Each was marked for a different year, from age nine to 50. Overwhelmed, he pressed his face into Aaron's arms. "Dad, I was wrong. I was so wrong." Just then, Aaron's phone rang. His assistant's excited voice crackled through. "Mr. Mueller, I've located Mrs. Mueller." … Raymond got me into a college in Dastovia. It had a reputation for being a breeze to get into but a nightmare to graduate from. Word was, some students stuck around for eight years just to scrape their degree together.

That night wasn't going to happen again in this life. I went home and dug out my old diary that I'd hidden in a deep corner of my wardrobe. I was ten years old, homeless and wandering the streets at night when Graham—18 at the time—took me in. He was cold and aloof with everyone else, but he was very gentle with me. I knew that I had fallen in love with him when I was old enough to realize it. However, it was a secret that I could never reveal to anyone else. I grabbed the diary and tore it to pieces, shredding every page. Then, I threw the scraps into the toilet and flushed them down.

Guilt crept in slow and heavy, settling somewhere I couldn't easily dislodge it from. Had I actually been selfish this entire time? Foolish, even, holding onto something for ten years that had never once given me anything back except grief and a trail of wreckage I kept leaving behind me. Ten years waiting for a woman who'd left without explanation. And the five years after that, I wasn't even certain anymore what exactly I'd been waiting for, or what I actually wanted out of any of it. Exhausted beyond anything I'd felt in longer than I could remember, I pushed myself up from the hard plastic chair and made my way back into the ward despite everything she'd said.

“Take it. You’ll catch a cold.” “Why do you care?” He fell silent for a moment. “I know you hate me.” “I don’t hate you.” I said, “I just think I wasted five years on someone who wasn’t worth it.” “Those five years—” I cut him off. “I worked sixteen-hour days during those five years in the middle of nowhere. My periods stopped for months at a time. My hair was falling out in handfuls. I endured all of it because I kept telling myself that I would finally marry you when I came back.”

He said: Most of the ones that matter. She wrote this down, all of it, in the notebook that had been accumulating since the beginning of the seventh book and that was now, in April, dense with the material of the Thursday mornings and the kitchen table conversations and the drawings and the observations and the letters and all the specific texture of the tenth year, which was the richest year of the nine because it was the year she could see from the furthest back, the year in which the whole decade was available as context, the year in which everything that had been building across ten years was simultaneously most present and most visible.

"You couldn't tolerate me showing Elena even the slightest affection, yet you can accept Vito sleeping with another woman? "It's only been a few months, and you already love him this much? What am I then? What about our ten years together?" I gave a soft, mocking laugh. "Ten years didn't stop you from changing the moment Elena appeared. So what right do you have to question me?" I closed my eyes, my face twisting as if in pain. After a long pause, I spoke again. "Come with me to see Vito one last time. After that, I'll give him up completely."

Elias set his coffee down with a shaking hand, his expression hovering between shock and a dawning, terrible realization. "I sent it, Clara. I remember hitting send on the platform while I watched the clock." He reached out, his fingers trembling slightly as he touched the corner of her blueprint. "Ten years," he whispered, his voice breaking. "We lost ten years because of a glitch in a network? Because of a tower that didn't relay a signal?" "Or because we were both too proud to pick up the phone and just ask 'why'," Clara added softly, her eyes filling with tears.