Eat, Pray, Love

tasting it as I left the beach and walked back to the little shack where I was staying. I found an
empty notebook, opened it up to the first page—and only then did I open my mouth and
speak those words into the air, letting them free. I let those words break my silence and then I
allowed my pencil to document their colossal statement onto the page: “I love you, I will never
leave you, I will always take care of you.”
Those were the first words I ever wrote in that private notebook of mine, which I would
carry with me from that moment forth, turning back to it many times over the next two years,
always asking for help—and always finding it, even when I was most deadly sad or afraid.
And that notebook, steeped through with that promise of love, was quite simply the only reas-
on I survived the next years of my life.
Eat, Pray, Love