Neil and Rowan exchange a look. “It took a lot to get here,” he says, and I get the sense there’s a deeper story there, one that isn’t the kind you tell during a first conversation with someone.
I let it sink in, trying to be okay with that uncertainty. As much as I’ve idealized the happily-ever-after, I can’t deny that he’s right. Today isn’t my epilogue with Neil-it’s a beginning. I’ll leave the happily-ever-afters in the books.
It’s not until I lean back in the seat, waiting for my car to warm up, that the scent of his hoodie hits me. Its smells good, and I wonder if its detergent or just the natural scent of Neil, one I’ve never really paid attention to before. I guess I’ve never really been close enough to notice. I’m stunned by how much I don’t hate it, so much so that it makes me light-headed for a split second.
I didn’t want to go off the rails, but I wanted to get close enough to see what was on the other side of them.
We could talk about anything- that was the first sign. I loved the person I was when I was with him, and we had the same values. Of course, that didn’t mean there weren’t things that annoyed me about him. No one’s perfect, obviously. But those things didn’t matter when I considered everything that made me love him.
But if there’s anything I’ve learned about depression, it’s that it is an intensely personal journey, one that never really ends.
And I wanted a hero who’d love her through her dark days, not despite them – because to me, that is the most romantic thing of all.
My anxiety-brain is never content to stress over one thing when it could be stressing over five.
That voice. It’s a time machine of familiar longing, tugging me back.
He “figured himself out” in college, the way people always say they’re going to do.
I cross and uncross my legs so many times it must look like I’m doing Pilates at best and a seductive chair dance at worst.
I just want to make sure-I don’t know. That you realized its me.
Then I take a deep breath... and I let it all go.
All these years, we were fighting when we could have been... not fighting.
He thought I was an ally. A confidant. A partner in crime. He couldn’t have known that Barret Bloom has always worked alone.
It’s impossible to get a hosting gig without experience, but you can’t get that experience unless you already have some experience under your belt. The joys of job hunting as a millennial.
And sometimes the world is terrible, and love stories... They make it feel less heavy.
I’m a barbed-wire fence. Every time he gets too close, I make myself sharper.
But you go into parenting hoping, maybe selfishly, that your kid will love the thing you love, and you can share that with them.
Short people are nothing if not skilled counter climbers.