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.

Helen tries to remind herself that her least favorite thing about herself is how much she cares about what other people think. And that they probably aren’t thinking about her anyway.

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.

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

You can still get hurt with your eyes wide open.”

This is what it would feel like to love Grant Shepard, she thinks, and it aches.

“You could keep me your dirty little secret, come to me tasting like other men, I’d still take you back every fucking time,” he says, a muscle ticking violently in his jaw. “I’d rather have a fraction of you than all of someone else.” Helen swallows. “I don’t want that for you. For either of us. It’s not—it’s not healthy.” “I don’t want to be healthy,” Grant says, and his chest is heaving as if he’s just run a marathon. “I just want you.”

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.”