How to End a Love Story

by Yulin Kuang

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.

She sometimes wonders if she’s incapable of loving the way other people do, and if the ones closest to her can sense it.

She could never quite shake the feeling that she wasn’t a particularly vital member of any group—she wasn’t the fun one, or the good-at-planning-things one, or the model-hot one.

frankly she finds the game of swiping and messaging and flirting to be somehow both tedious and embarrassing. There shouldn’t be a written record of her rough-draft attempts at dating.

“I feel like you’d be an oak tree. It’s like the golden retriever of trees.”

“A lot of sci-fi,” she says, scanning his paperback collection. “Hard fantasy,” he corrects reflexively. She laughs, then glances up at him with a suggestive smile. “Dirty.”

She kisses him to stop the words in his mouth, but she can still feel the shape of them against her lips as he kisses her back,

The kind of ending where someone else sees the best and worst of me and loves me back. We’d be happy together, we’d be sad together, we’d be everything together. And when it’s all over and we’ve reached another ending, my ashes would be scattered over the tree that grows from his body because till death do us part wouldn’t be enough, because I’d need more than one brief eternity with him.

“You don’t have to be completely healed to be everything I want. To be mine. I love every part of you, you silly, infuriating woman. I love the parts of you I haven’t even met yet.”