Funny Story

by Emily Henry

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

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.

“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.”

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.

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.

This is how time works. The things you wait months for blink past, like the flash of a strobe, huge swaths lost in the dark beats between.

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

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. Sometimes things are hard. They just are.