FOREVER Judy Blume

Reading Response

Forever
Judy Blume

Katherine returns home after seven weeks at tennis camp. After weeks of just going along on their separate paths, Katherine and Michael bump into each other at the store where he is working. They awkwardly say hello to each other, without any personal emotions involved. When Katherine gets home, still reminiscing about her and Michael as well as thinking about their awkward encounter, her mom pulls the phone away from her ear and says to Katherine, "Jeff called".

It's so weird how one day Katherine was completely, from head to toe, in love with Michael, and he felt the same way about her, now all of a sudden they not only don't show any emotions of any kind towards each other, but they don't even have more than one word to say to each other after all that time.  It's sad. How can people who were once so close, grow so far apart?

But on the other hand maybe it wasn't true love. I mean maybe since they were both a little bit unexperienced when it came to love they just felt like what they had was true and "forever" because they had never felt anywhere close to that before. So maybe this new guy, Jeff, will show her a different perspective of love, or maybe not, but even though she thought Michael was forever, he was actually just one large bump in the roller coaster of her love life.

I guess it's sort of like the saying "don't judge a book by it's cover" like even if it seems perfect and forever, you never know the outcome or what the relationship, or whatever it may be will has in it. You may think that you will end up with this one person but then end up being very wrong with each other and grow apart. For me I don't just see it as relationships, but like if you think you know what you want to be "when you grow up" or something, and then you actually do grow up and those things don't really intrigue you anymore, and you want to do something else. You really just never know what will change in you or how things turn out or what they mean, but I guess that it's the experience that counts and makes you change and grow.