Funny Story

by Emily Henry

Some people are natural storytellers. They know how to set the scene, find the right angle, when to pause for dramatic effect or breeze past inconvenient details. I wouldn’t have become a librarian if I didn’t love stories, but I’ve never been great at telling my own.

Life, I’d learned, is a revolving door. Most things that come into it only stay awhile.

There was no point clinging to something that wasn’t really yours.

Miles is the other kind. The kind that’s disarming enough that you don’t feel nervous talking to him, or like you need to show your best angle, until—wham! Suddenly, he’s smiling at you with his messy hair and impish smirk, and you realize his hotness has been boiling around you so slowly you missed it.

I feel like I’m back in high school calculus, random bits of equations and numbers drifting around me nonsensically: there’s some kind of meaning there, but I do not have the right brain to interpret it.

You can’t untell someone your secrets. You can’t unsay those delicate truths once you learn you can’t trust the person you handed them to.

“I’m vetting my friend’s new boyfriend,” she tells him. “Aren’t they cute?” “If anything,” I say to Miles, “we’re still vetting her.” He looks over, smile deepening. “I say we keep her.” “Who’s going to feed and walk her?” I say. “I will,” he insists. “Every day. I promise.”

The banter is bantering. 👏🏼💙🥰

“Things go smoother if you don’t let people get a rise out of you,” he says. “If you give them control over how you feel, they’ll always use it.” “Finally, I see your cynical side,” I say. He smiles, but his jaw is tight, and the smile doesn’t reach his eyes. “It’s not cynical. If you don’t give other people responsibility for your feelings, you can have a decent relationship with most of them.”

If a person lets you down, it’s time to reconsider what you’re asking of them.

This ridiculously nice man who let me move into his place, no questions asked—didn’t even charge rent my first month—and comped my food tonight and bought me a milkshake and brought me to a beach I’d never been to and lent me his jacket. Offered to parade me around all summer, just so I won’t move away. After hanging out twice. In general, I don’t put too much stock into a person’s charm, but I think he might be the rare real deal. A genuinely kind person who likes everyone and deserved better than a note on the counter and Petra’s room-sized closet cleared out.

He smiles faintly, tucking my hair behind my ear. It makes me feel like a two-liter bottle of soda flipped upside down, all the bubbles suddenly rushing in the opposite direction.

You can’t force a person to show up, but you can learn a lesson when they don’t. Trust people’s actions, not their words. Don’t love anyone who isn’t ready to love you back. Let go of the people who don’t hold on to you. Don’t wait on anyone who’s in no rush to get to you.

The infamous low chortle sneaks out of me, and his smile is so affectionate I wish I could roll myself up in it like a blanket.

Feelings are like weather. They just happen, and then they pass.”

We’re basically always together, but we’re almost never alone, aside from once when he accidentally locked his keys in the truck and I had to bring his spare up to the winery. I’m already in my pajamas, so he comes out to meet me in the lot, with a grin and a hug that smells like campfire and feels like a hook in my heart.

You’d think I’d brought her to Disneyland. Put this girl in a room full of books, and she’s happier than anyone I’ve met. Never understood it myself, but it was cute as hell to watch her stack up as many as she could carry and slide them onto a desk higher than her forehead to check them out.”

He pulls me into his chest and winds his arms around me. Warm, friendly, familiar Miles, and it surprises me how much it hurts to be this close to him. How it only seems to underscore that I won’t be any closer.

Life isn’t a competition, and neither is love, but I’m still the loser.

My chest aches at the sight of him, so scruffy, so messy, so familiar. I want to hide from him, and I want to be held by him. I want to apologize for earlier and I want to never talk about it again.

“You make the people you care about feel like . . .” He pauses. “Like you want all of them. Not just the good parts. And that’s terrifying to someone who’s spent a lifetime avoiding those other pieces of themselves.” “I don’t want to scare people off,” I say, throat aching. He shakes his head. “It’s worth being scared. Trust me. You’re worth it.”

I should feel happy, or at least relieved, but all I can feel is this whole-chest ache, yet another loss of someone, something, I didn’t even have to begin with.

And I’m not sure why I wasted all that time and energy, because when I think about family—that thing I’d always longed for—it’s never been a Norman Rockwell painting that I picture. It’s me and Mom, on the couch, eating microwaved corn dogs while Dial M for Murder plays on TV. It’s running out from the library at night to her car, a greasy box of Little Caesars pizza in the passenger seat, her joking, I thought we’d do Italian. It’s being pulled away from watching the frost melt on the living room window to make stovetop hot cocoa from a packet, and that last tight hug at the end of the airport security line, and packing up cardboard boxes, knowing I’ll always have what I need, no matter how much I leave behind.

All those moments throughout the days, weeks, months that don’t get marked on calendars with hand-drawn stars or little stickers. Those are the moments that make a life. Not grand gestures, but mundane details that, over time, accumulate until you have a home, instead of a house. The things that matter. The things I can’t stop longing for. There’s only one place that feeling exists for me, only one person with whom I belong.

“I love you more than everything else on this planet combined. But no one person can be everything we need.

Life’s short enough without us talking ourselves out of hope and trying to dodge every bad feeling. Sometimes you have to push through the discomfort, instead of running.”

I feel a pang of longing. Nostalgia, I guess, for every library I’ve ever loved, and the little girl who dreamed of this: being the first person in and the last out of a building brimming with books. And feeling like it belonged to me in a way, and I to it. A home, when nowhere else felt right.

I felt like I was as close as I’d ever be to true magic. That feeling of curiosity and awe and wonder. That was where I made my home every time we moved, a sensation that couldn’t be taken away.