This Impossible Brightness

by Jessica Bryant Klagmann

It was there, with his feet on the bookstore doormat, on which the words GO AWAY, I’M READING were printed, that Hayden MacKenna realized he did not get to choose, and that gripping to one’s own existence is only a recipe for disappointment.

“Alex was the only person I knew that was like me. Since the first moment we met, he just understood what it was like to need quiet and solitude. No one else wants to let you do that, you know? They’ll just tell you that you’re detached and snobby and a thousand other things. I can’t tell you how many people have said they thought I was some horrible bitch before they got to know me. But he just got it.

“Oh, you,” he said coolly, backing up and giving her shoulder a squeeze. “Sometimes I feel it, too, the weight of it all. And I always admired you. You don’t compromise.”

Is all of life, she wondered, simply one long journey narrowing in on those particular people who bring you peace, only to have them taken away?