Expiration Dates

by Rebecca Serle

Wasn’t the hardest part of heartbreak the unpredictability?

I do miss the thing I don’t have. It’s strange to feel that, to want something that you’ve never even known before. But that’s love, isn’t it? The belief in something you cannot see or touch or even explain. Like the heart itself, we just know it’s there.

It’s hard to hold on to people the older we get. Life looks different for everyone, and you have to keep choosing one another. You have to make a conscious effort to say, over and over again, “You.” Not everyone makes that choice. Not everyone can.

There isn’t just one way to achieve things. You can always be the exception.”

There is nothing more terrifying than lying in a hospital bed and knowing your mom can’t fix it. That she can’t make it better. That no amount of bargaining with any doctor will carry you—the both of you—to safety.

I often wonder what our responsibility is to other people, how much we owe them. Whose job is it to look out for our own happiness. Us, or the people who love us? It’s both, of course. We owe ourselves and each other. But in what order?

We have to be cracked open sometimes. We have to be cracked open sometimes to let anything good in. What I see now, emerging in the mirror, is this one, simple truth: learning to be broken is learning to be whole.

But being surprised by life isn’t losing, it’s living. It’s messy and uncomfortable and complicated and beautiful. It’s life, all of it. The only way to get it wrong is to refuse to play.

It always seems impossible to believe the things we cannot see.

we work because I feel like I can be every bad and impossible version of myself with him. I can change.