Expiration Dates

by Rebecca Serle

Real love, the kind that makes you want to grow old together, makes you not just unafraid of all that time with one person but electrified by it.

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.

“Depth,” he says. “The opposite of casual is deep.”

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.

The truth is hard. It’s complicated. It does not always follow a simple structure. It is not always convenient.

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

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?

Protection and love are not the same thing. Love says, I will try and I will fail. Love says, Despite. Love says, And yet and yet and yet.

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.

We are powerful because we affect each other’s stories, all of us. We are here to impact each other, to knock into each other, to throw each other off-balance, sometimes even off track.

Love is a net. It can catch you long after the person is no longer there.