Funny Story

by Emily Henry

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

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.

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

For just one night, I’d like to pretend. I’d like to be someone else. Not the uptight one, or the damaged one, or the one who gets left.

“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.”

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’d wanted so badly to escape myself, my life, that I forgot about all the beautiful little pieces of it I’ve been acquiring like sea glass these last few months. Things that no one can take from me.

. like there’s so much space between who I am and who I want to be, and there’s no one to show me how to get there.

Things were allowed to be complicated. They were allowed to be messy. We were allowed to disagree and argue and even hurt each other, on occasion, and it didn’t mean it was time to let the revolving door of life carry us away from each other.

“Funny story . . .” he says, but he doesn’t go on, just watches me and waits. He knows how much I love to tell it.