Funny Story

by Emily Henry

he volunteered that he was too, that his family always treated birthdays like huge personal successes rather than markers of time. And when I told him that sounded beautiful,

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. 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.

“Soulmates?” She laughs. “No. I’m saying your ex is the little boy looking over someone else’s shoulder, trying to figure out if the kid next to him has a better lunch. Only, the lunch box is shut, so even though he knows what his parents packed for him is pretty good, he’d still trade it just to open up that rusty little Batman lunch box.”

“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.”

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

“CrossFit,” Miles says thoughtfully. “That explains it.” “What could that possibly explain?” I ask. “The screams and clanking metal I hear from the other room when you’re on speakerphone.” “Oh, no,” I say, “that’s unrelated.” “I don’t want any more information,” he plays along. “I feel totally uncurious.” “My regularly scheduled calls with Christian Grey are completely mundane.” His brows pinch. “Who?” “It’s from a book,” I say. “Never mind.”

I dragged her to a backyard poetry reading where a guy I liked performed a truly horrific homage to Allen Ginsberg’s Howl that quickly resolved my crush on him.

If he’s a Labrador, she’s more of a clumsy pit bull, thwacking into corners and swinging her head into coffee tables without batting an eye, completely unselfconscious.

“I guess it’s nice being around people who’ve made it through shit, you know?” He shrugs. “Like probably all their worst mistakes are behind them, and they know who they are now, and how to be who they want to be.”

Every time he looks over, it’s like the sun peeking out from behind a cloud, and I do my best to feel content, to be just another person at the edge of his glow.

“I just think,” I say to Miles, “you like people almost as much as they like you. And it makes being around you feel like—like standing in sunlight.”

North Bear Shores for a bookstore event with a romance writer Sadie had turned me on to years ago.

Drinking wine out back with friends during lightning bug season.

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

“Somebody recently told me that feelings are like the weather. They just kind of happen.”

“No, she’s way better than her old man. She’s always had direction.”

My shoulders loosen. “I can do that.” “Of course you can,” she says. “You’re Daphne Fucking Vincent.” “Aww.” I touch my chest. “You know my last name and my middle name.”

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.