How to End a Love Story

by Yulin Kuang

“What do you do about imposter syndrome?” she once asked a much more successful, senior author over a celebratory brunch. “Well, at a certain point, it becomes unseemly,” he told her.

You’re too good-looking to be a writer, Helen immediately wants to say out loud. You didn’t have an awkward teen phase that forced you to develop a rich interior life to compensate.

Maybe being bad at things in front of other people is the secret glue of friendship.

I’ve always found endings harder than beginnings, goodbyes harder than hellos. When I was a kid, I had this idea—a hope, really—that life and death were two sides of the same door, and that when you died, there would be a long hallway in the afterlife where you would walk past the doors of all the lives you’d lived before. My theory was that in that hallway, you’d be able to remember every single life you’d ever lived, and if you concentrated all your effort on it, you could take a single intention or lesson with you, before opening the next door and starting your next life.