“I’ll come back… I will always, always come back for you.”
In my novel, Into the Night and Gone, Jackson makes that promise to Annie when they’re young. And he means it. There’s no hesitation or calculation, just pure conviction – the kind of fearless and naive conviction that only exists when you’re still young enough to believe that the world will bend to your will.
When we’re young, we have a way of making promises in absolutes. Who could blame us? We think we’re invincible, allowing forever to feel manageable, distance to feel temporary, and love to feel completely indestructible.
Then we “grow up”. As adults, sometimes we look back at those words and measure them against what actually happened, and when life doesn’t unfold the way we swore it would, we feel something like betrayal, even when no one set out to deceive.
The truth is, young people make promises with the tools they have at the time. They don’t yet understand time, or change, or the various ways life builds us, breaks us, and, ultimately, reshapes us.
That doesn’t make the promise meaningless, though.
It just makes it human.
Into the Night and Gone is, in part, about learning how to live with the gap between what we swore would happen and what actually did.