Yearning is a red-haired girl sitting on the hood of her silver sedan, reading about Marilyn Monroe.
I was okay just a moment ago. I will learn how to be okay again.
We were nostalgic for a time that wasn’t yet over.
I thought that it was more likely the opposite. I must have shut grief out. Found it in books. Cried over fiction instead of the truth. The truth was unconfined, unadorned. There was no poetic language to it, no yellow butterflies, no epic floods. There wasn’t a town trapped underwater or generations of men with the same name destined to make the same mistakes. The truth was vast enough to drown in.
I wish you more happiness than can fit in a person.
The trouble with denial is that when the truth comes, you aren’t ready.
Because in the conversation beneath this one, what we’re really saying is I am an imperfect person. Here are my failures. Do you want me anyway?
I wonder if there’s a secret current that connects people who have lost something. Not in the way that everyone loses something, but in the way that undoes your life, undoes your self, so that when you look at your face it isn’t yours anymore.
What I mean is don’t be a person who seeks out grief. There is enough of that in life.
And I think of how time passes so differently for different people.
When you love someone, you are sure. You don’t need time to decide. You don’t say stop and start over and over, like you’re playing some kind of sport. You know the immensity of what you have and you protect it.
I never realized what a big deal that was. How amazing it is to find someone who wants to hear about all the things that go on in your head. You just think that things will stay the way they are. You never look up, in a moment that feels like every other moment in your life, and think, “Soon this will be over”. But I understand more now. About the way life works.
If only I had something to take the edge off the loneliness. If only lonely were a more accurate word. It should sound much less pretty.
They weren’t cheap and I was almost broke. It was a choice between dinner and flowers and I chose flowers because it was a dark time in my life and my room was hideous and my heart was broken and I needed something beautiful.
She leans over our table and turns the sign in the window so that it says CLOSED on the outside. But on our side, perfectly positioned between Mabel’s place and mine, it says OPEN. If this were a short story, it would mean something.
I wonder if we will become okay again. I hope for it.
I hate that word. Straight. At the very least, those of us who are nonstraight should get called curvy. Or scenic. Actually, I like that: ‘Do you think she’s straight?’ ‘Oh no. She’s scenic.
I learn that I am a tiny piece of a miraculous world.
I don’t know if I still love her in the way I used to, but I still find her just as beautiful.
She was never something waiting to be solved. All she is – all she’s ever been – is a person trying to live a life.