Funny Story

by Emily Henry

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.

Until that moment, I’d carried my life like a handkerchief knapsack at the end of a broom handle, something small and containable I could pick up and move at the drop of a hat. And I never knew what it was I was running from, or to, until he said it.

and now you’re thirty-three and trying to remember how to even make friends. But who would ever find herself in that situation?”

“Does it smell like gingersnaps?”

“I’ve got stuff to do, but if you hear from your ex, tell him I said…” He holds up his middle finger. “If you hear from yours, tell her thanks for the new boyfriend.” “Gladly,” he says, and turns to go.

LOL

I’d thought we were building something permanent together. Now I realize I’d just been slotting myself into his life, leaving me without my own.

I’m nauseated by the thought that maybe she belongs there, in that home I’d thought was mine, while I belong nowhere.

I don’t know how to talk along the surface of things, but I also don’t want to unearth the ugly stuff, over and over again, for people who are just passing through my life.

Like every time I dole out a kernel of my history to someone who’s not going to become a fixture in my life, a piece of me gets carried away, somewhere I can never get it back.

You can’t untell someone your secrets. You can’t unsay those delicate truths once you learn you can’t trust...

“Oooh, she needs to hydrate,” she says. “Must be juicy.”

“Getting mad never fixes anything,” he says.

“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.”

“He told you to trust him, and that’s what you did,” he insists. “That’s what you’re supposed to be able to do with people you love.

“I thought about taking a video of myself giving you a lap dance, but I don’t have anything to mount your phone on, so this was the next best thing.” “I will happily go back into the woods, find some sticks, and build you a tripod, Daphne,” he says.

HAHAHAH

“It’s a library, Daphne. If you can’t be a human here, where can you?”

But so much of life’s good. What’s the point of dwelling on the shit that’s not?”

“Ah,” he says. “Not a big reader.” “I know that’s a possibility,” I say, “and yet I truly cannot fathom it.” “What do you like about it,” he says. “Everything,” I say. His mouth curls. “Fascinating.” “I like that it feels like I can live as many lives as I want,” I say.

“Or maybe,” he says, eyes crinkled against the sun, “everything worth doing comes with some risk.”

Whenever I did anything that she thought made her look bad, it turned into this huge thing about how I must hate her, to try to hurt her like that. If I was upset, or anxious, or hungry, or even sick, she acted like it was something I was doing to her, and I believed it.”

It's "funny" how a book makes you relive certain things despite you being a complete stranger

“You’re not broken. You’re okay. But what happened to you isn’t. It’s fucked up.”

“That’s the problem, though. Whenever any of us had a negative emotion, it only made things worse. She turned it around on us, and we’d end up apologizing for being hurt or angry or sad, and I never knew what was right or normal.

“I don’t think there’s a right way to feel,” I say. “And you can’t control it, anyway. Feelings are like weather. They just happen, and then they pass.”

Maybe things are complicated, but they’re also good.

“you like people almost as much as they like you. And it makes being around you feel like—like standing in sunlight.”

“You were shy, but you were brave.”

“And it’s not a day to celebrate progress, anyway,” I insist. “It’s a day to celebrate existence. We have to do something.”

I feel an embarrassing amount of pride at having become a regular someplace new, on my own.

“A part of me is just waiting,” I rasp, “for the moment when you see whatever it is that drives people away.

I don’t want you to stop wanting me around. I think it might break my heart to be someone you don’t like.”

It’s easy to be loved by the ones who’ve never seen you fuck up. The ones you’ve never had to apologize to, and who still think all your ‘quirks’ are charming.

“It’s easy to be around people who don’t know you.

But after a while, someone either finally sees you or they don’t, and either way it fucking sucks. Because if they see you, and it’s not what they signed up for, then they’re out of there. And if they never see you…it’s worse. Because you’re just alone.

“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.”

“It’s worth being scared. Trust me. You’re worth it.”

I feel like Belle in the beginning of Beauty and the Beast, walking around with a shit-eating grin, greeting everyone like it’s the first day of the rest of my life.

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’m exactly the kind of person he can’t handle being with, and he’s exactly the kind who could destroy me,” I explain. “Honey.” Ashleigh touches my hand. “That’s how it works. That’s love.”

I spent so much time accustoming myself to one kind of surprise—the kind hinging on disappointments, hurts, small abandonments, and emotional bartering—that I’d stopped considering there might be any other.

A surprise, it turns out, is different when it comes from someone who knows and loves you.

The same universe that dispassionately takes things away can bring you things you weren’t imaginative enough to dream up.

“Suddenly it seemed selfish of me. To love you.”

The more important thing, though, was that she was too happy with the life she’d built for herself to change it for anyone who didn’t set her world on fire. And I liked that for her. She deserved the life she’d worked so hard for.