“I wanted all these stories to be love stories and not happy endings, sanitized love stories, but the real mess… Love is shaky, and magical, and terrifying.”
-Sherman Alexie in BookPage
Everyone is motivated by something, whether it be love, hate or revenge but most of the time it stems from love. The heart of what we do comes from what we love. We take on these weights and embark on these journeys all for what? Why does Sherman Alexie’s Frank Snake Church, in his novel Ten Little Indians, begin basketball again after giving it up for so many years? Why does Olympic gymnast Danell Leyva pursue gymnastics even when all the odds aren’t in his favor? Similarly, why do I go to college? None of these quests are straight and narrow, they’re filled with twists and turns that make us question that love that motivates us to do them at all. Even when things are difficult and the journey looks like it’ll never end, Frank, Danell and I pursue these journeys because of the love we have for we do. The love is the similarity that bonds our journeys but our reasoning that justifies that love is what makes them different.
Reading others and reading my own helped me hammer out the repetition in my intro. I had problems with repetition and I didn’t have a clear claim until I rewrote it again.