A Walk to Remember Prologue

Chapter Summary: Nicholas Sparks tries to convince the reader that Landon is deep and wise. And we have a time warp.

When I was seventeen, my life changed forever.

“I got married and had a ‘come to Jesus’ moment.”

I know that there are people who wonder about me when I say this.

There are expecting you to tell them about your life changing moment.

They look at me strangely as if trying to fathom what could have happened back then, though I seldom bother to explain.

“If I did that, then people would stop thinking about me. And that would suck.”

Because I’ve lived here for most of my life, I don’t feel that I have to unless it’s on my terms,

Translation: I want to tell you my life story but it must be on my terms.

and that would take more time than most people are willing to give me.

Most people don’t want to listen to an old man prattle on about their life.

My story can’t be summed up in two or three sentences; it can’t be packaged into something neat and simple that people would immediately understand.

I can do it in one sentence.

A douchebag marries with a minister’s daughter who is dying from leukemia.

My story in some ways is their story because it was something that all of us lived through.

Unless you are living somewhere isolated from civilization, your life story is going to have people in it.

It was I, however, who was closest to it.

No shit. In order for it to be your life story, you need to be involved.

So Landon says that he is fifty-seven years old and can remember everything like it was yesterday.

I relive that year often in my mind, bringing it back to life, and I realize that when I do, I always feel a strange combination of sadness and joy.

“Ignore the fact that I ridiculed the girl and avoided her until I find out she was dying.”

There are moments when I wish I could roll back the clock and take all the sadness away, but I have the feeling that if I did, the joy would be gone as well.

Just like a character in a John Green novel, Landon is an asshole who thinks he is wiser than everyone else.

So I take the memories as they come, accepting them all, letting them guide me whenever I can.

“Especially the one where I won’t date a girl because she had a glass eye and how she reminded me of a taxidermy owl.“

Landon leaves his house and looks around. He also mentions that it is overcast along with the fact that the dog-woods and azaleas are blooming.

The temperature is cool, though I know it’s only a matter of weeks before it will settle into something comfortable and the gray skies give way to the kind of days that make North Carolina one of the most beautiful places in the world.

In a Nicholas Sparks novel, there is always at least one description of how the South (usually North Carolina) is a majestic place.

And yes, I know people have a preference in climes and locations.

But this is coming from an author who acted like an ugly American traveling abroad with his brother for three weeks…

I have a feeling that this is an “Amurica fuck yeah!” moment. Landon starts to recall when he was seventeen years old.

I close my eyes and the years begin to move in reverse, slowly ticking backward, like the hands of a clock rotating in the wrong direction. As if through someone else’s eyes, I watch myself grow younger; I see my hair changing from gray to brown, I feel the wrinkles around my eyes begin to smooth, my arms and legs grow sinewy.

Did Nicholas Sparks seriously introduce time travel into the story?

Remembering the past does not induce an out of body experience in which you see yourself getting young.

Landon says that he is forgetting all of the life lessons he has learned. Everything changed all around him and now he is standing in front of a Baptist church.

This is my story; I promise to leave nothing out. First you will smile, and then you will cry— don’t say you haven’t been warned.

Uh… no.

The reader will be wincing every time Landon says and does something douchey.