Expiration Dates

by Rebecca Serle

I wanted a love story that sung.

He leaned forward. “Is that a challenge?” “I don’t think it can be,” I said. “I don’t think you want the prize.”

My dad greets me when I get there. “Chicken,” he says. “You’re here.”

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.

But he does not know the thing I keep trying to tell him. He does not know about the pieces of paper, what they mean.

I guess I don’t really get why she needs to tell him at all.

“Isn’t that a Tony Robbins saying?” Kendra asks. “If something isn’t working, change it. Keep changing it until it works?”

The TA, her name was Kensington—I remember because everyone called her Kenny, like the South Park character—told

“Life is a catch-22,” Irina says. “That’s why God invented female friendship.”

Jake should be a father. He should wake up for midnight feedings and research strollers and coach Little League teams. He should paper thighs with Band-Aids and make spaghetti five nights in a row. He should change diapers and set up plastic swing sets and fill up an iPhone with videos. He’s that man.

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?

“Because,” Hugo says. His eyes look into mine—solid black pools. They look like rocks in the water—landing, skipping the surface. “I wrote Jake’s note.”

Omg!!!

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.

He exhales. “Love is a net.” He looks right at me. His eyes are gentle. I see in them the enormity of his grief, the enormity of his love. “She would tell me all the time that the love we had mattered, that it could catch you, that it was catching you.”

I will say that my love story, when it arrived, felt less like the ending to my single years and more like the start of something else entirely.