Romance with CEO

s grow, nor did I find it cruel. I saw a certain beauty in it. And a lovely fullness and justice, too. It was exactly what my grandfather would have loved, now that his thick sausage-like fingers c

ter spinning by herself a few feet away and loving to get dizzy and fall to the ground, a daisy chain tied around my ankle, and a lump in my throat so big I wasn't sure if I'd swallowed one of the giant bees swarming around the flower buffet next to us, I tried to comprehend the fact of my impending demise. The others were shocked that he'd said that, but instead of defending me and denying this premonition-like statement, they gave me a sad look and nodded. "Yes, it's true," they all agreed with that one look. "You're going to die, Jasmine." In my long silence, Kevin hatched an even more horrific plan for me, driving the knife even deeper. Not only would I die, but before that, I would have something called a period every month for the rest of my life, which would cause excruciating pain and agony. Then I learned how babies were made, in a description so in-depth that I found it so horrifying that I could barely look my parents in the eye for a week, and then, to rub salt in my open wound, I learned that Santa Claus didn't exist. You try to forget things like that, but I couldn't. And why am I talking about this episode in my life? Well, it was where I started. Where I, as I know myself, as everyone knows me, was formed. My life began when I was five years old. Knowing that I was going to die instilled something in me that I still carry with me to this day: the awareness that, although time was infinite, my time was finite, my time was running out. I realized that my time and someone else's were not the same thing. We cannot spend this hour in the same way, nor can we think about it in the same way. Do what you will with yours, but don't drag me along with you; I have no time to waste. If you want to do something, you have to do it now. If you want to say something, then you have to say it now. And most of all, you have to do it yourself. It's your life, you're the one who's going to die, you're the one who's going to lose. So I got used to getting things done, to making things happen. I worked at a pace that often left me breathless, and I barely had a moment to regroup with myself. I ran after me a lot, but I rarely caught up; I was fast. I took a lot of things with me fro