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. Mom was the only permanent thing in my life, the only thing that mattered.

Home. The word stoked an ember in my chest. Here was the permanence I’d been waiting for. A place that would belong to us.

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.

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.” “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.”

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

I’m not sure what parts of me are him and which parts are genuinely my own. And I want to know. I want to know myself, to test my edges and see where I stop and the rest of the world begins.

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

“Anything you need a helmet to do,” I say, “you probably simply shouldn’t do.”

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

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.

“Out here, you’re small and there’s no one else around, but you’re not lonely. It’s like you’re connected to everyone and everything.”

The moment feels like a held breath, or a soap bubble, something that can’t last, that has to break one way or another.

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.

Here, tonight, though, I’m in the center of everything. This moment, though fleeting, belongs to me too.

I could be happy here. I could belong.

I see him laugh but can’t hear it, and I feel robbed of the sound.

But right now, he’s entirely mine and I’m his.

Someday I’ll be okay, someday.

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’m a cynic. And a cynic is a romantic who’s too scared to hope.”

I feel a pang of longing. Nostalgia, I guess, for every library I’ve ever loved, and the little girl who dreamed of this: being the first person in and the last out of a building brimming with books. And feeling like it belonged to me in a way, and I to it.

A home, when nowhere else felt right.

That feeling of curiosity and awe and wonder. That was where I made my home every time we moved, a sensation that couldn’t be taken away.

It wasn’t just a pretty word, thrown out in a convenient moment. It was true. And it makes me feel brave, being loved by him. It makes me safe enough to do the thing I never could.

I’d tempered my expectations, packed them tight into bricks, built a fortress to protect me. But keeping every glimmer of hope out has isolated me too, and I want to be seen. I want to be loved. I want to live with the hope that things can get better, even if, in the end, they don’t.

You should always be here, my heart answers.

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

sometimes the unexpected is better than what you plan.

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

it feels like just the two of us in a world that’s fast asleep.

We wander along the lake’s edge, and the silence doesn’t feel awkward. It’s its own kind of conversation, a reintroduction after our time apart.

I woke up … happy. Happier than I can remember being.”

He knows me, and I see him.

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

“I didn’t learn what love was supposed to feel like. It doesn’t feel natural, or come easily to me, to let anyone close. But you—you make love so easy, Daphne. You make me think I already deserve it, exactly how I am.

The ways it will all go wrong, and the beauty that can only happen in the wake.

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.

So many of the most beautiful things in life are unexpected.

“Funny story …” he says, but he doesn’t go on, just watches me and waits.

He knows how much I love to tell it.