[ WP ] At age 18 you are required to go to city hall and have someone read you through a choose your own adventure style book of your life while you make the choices . The choices are permanent and will determine your life . You are the clerk reading the books .

It's not about the ending... It's just not about the ending. 
 
 I try and tell that to them, but they do n't listen, really. I guess I would n't have, when I was 18, but there was no Choosing then, not with an upper case. 
 
 Just choices, that I made more or less without thinking, and it led me here. Because I did n't think any of my choices mattered that much. 
 
 But these kids, they do. They really do. They think the Choosing is the most important moment of their lives, and they come into my office and sit in my chair and sweat and fidget and, often, cry. 
 
 It tears them apart to have to Choose all at once, because they want a good ending for their story. Everyone wants a happy ending. 
 
 And I watch my newest client, a kid in a buttoned up collar who's never really lived, Choose fifty years of hard work, eighty hour weeks, a wife who does the right thing, kids who get into college. I watch him Choose the `` right'' path, where he dies in bed, surrounded by his grandchildren, rich and ripe and old. 
 
 And I flip past the pages about Mary, about how they ran on the beach in the dark. About the way she looked at him, the way her smile broke his heart and made him real. About how he could always make her laugh. 
 
 I skipped over the pages of debt and struggle, that would have been sweet with her smile in every paragraph, with her laugh in every line. I skip every one, because he chose the responsible ending, not the one where he dies in a car accident on the way home from a party at forty-two. 
 
 I ca n't tell him, or any of them, but I wish they knew. The only good endings are the ones that complete a good story.
