If I have ever truly cared about you, at some point I gave you a copy of The Things They Carried.  

I’m not really a mixed messages kind of girl.  You can literally weigh my devotion to you based on whether or not I ever handed you that book.

My devotion to that novel is intense, but it’s not one that stems all the way back to my childhood.  I actually never even heard of the book until I became a teacher and realized I was expected to teach the thing after I finished The Catcher in the Rye, an experience that did not end well.  I had to calm my students down when they became furious by the book’s somewhat ambiguous ending that refused to lay everything out neatly and then tie the strings of the narrative into a sweet bow.  Something I’ve learned over the years?  The average reader wants to be left with absolutely no questions – the average reader wants to have everything resolved perfectly.