How to End a Love Story

by Yulin Kuang

Maybe being bad at things in front of other people is the secret glue of friendship. The thought lights up like a Christmas tree in her stomach, and that’s when she realizes the edible has kicked in. Oh no, she thinks with a laugh, I’m thirty-one and peer pressure still works on me.

“You’re high,” he says finally, trying not to laugh. “I just . . . never thought I’d see the day.” “Someone brought gummies,” she says with a frown. “I succumbed to peer pressure.”

She’s made only the barest of attempts at dating in LA—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.

“You deserve to be happy. I hope you know that.”

“Oh my god,” she says, wiping tears from her eyes. “You’re going to hell.” “And you’re riding shotgun with me,” Grant says as he throws the car in reverse.

She’s sitting in his car now and there isn’t a wall between them. But there is a coatrack. And he can’t help but feel the stupid thing is a spindly little metaphor for something.

“Now, come on,” Tom says plaintively. “Someone else has to have seen that!” The room bursts into laughter, and Helen feels herself laughing too as Grant loops his free arm around her and presses a kiss to the side of her head. This is what it would feel like to love Grant Shepard, she thinks, and it aches.

He’s so in love with her it hurts.

“Fine, then,” he says against her mouth, and he’s suddenly cold despite the kitchen heat. “It’s my birthday. Lie to me. Treat me like you love me back.”

Helen wakes up in the blue light of four a.m. and gets in her car. She pulls up a Spotify playlist—“driving away from the stupid damn love of my life”—and heads home.

He packs a week’s worth of clothes and realizes Helen still has his favorite T-shirt. He decides she can keep that souvenir.

He wonders if there’s any world where their paths could have crossed differently. He’s been to the city half a dozen times in the last six years for work, usually against his will, hating it the whole time. He’s even been to Bryant Park, sat at these very picnic tables. But would he have recognized her in the crowd? And if he had, would he have done anything about it? What if they hadn’t known each other at all in high school, what then? Would some essential part of him still have recognized some essential part of her?

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.

“Helen,” he exhales, his forehead against hers. “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.” “I love you too,” she says, and her cold, broken heart suddenly seems to glow from the feeling of saying it out loud to someone else and meaning it so damn much. “I love you so much, it doesn’t make sense to me in words.”