Funny Story

by Emily Henry

This is my problem. 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. It’s depleting. 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.

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

“It’s not one man,” he says. “Damn,” I say. “A modern Walt Whitman.”

“No. I wanted everything to be okay so badly. So I tried to broker peace.

“Honey.” She laughs. “I’m a cynic. And a cynic is a romantic who’s too scared to hope.”