The Last Thing He Told Me

by Laura Dave

He never understood that I wasn’t scared of someone leaving me. I was scared that the wrong person would stay.

Isn’t that how it’s supposed to work, the kettle boils once you stop watching?

This is the terrible thing about a tragedy. It isn’t with you every minute. You forget it, and then you remember it again. And you see it with a stark quality: This is what is required of you now, just to get along.

“My grandfather used to say that most people don’t want to hear the thing that will make it work better,” I said. “They want to hear what will make it easier.”

“Einstein said, So far as the theories of mathematics are about reality, they are not certain; so far as they are certain, they are not about reality.”

How do you explain it when you find in someone what you’ve been waiting for your whole life? Do you call it fate? It feels lazy to call it fate. It’s more like finding your way home—where home is a place you secretly hoped for, a place you imagined, but where you’d never before been.

“We forget all sorts of things that no one helps us remember,”

That sometimes you find your way to the place that wants you most.”

This is the thing about good and evil. They aren’t so far apart—and they often start from the same valiant place of wanting something to be different.

We don’t turn away from the parts of someone we don’t want to see. However quickly or long it takes to see them. We accept them if we are strong enough. Or we accept them enough to not let the bad parts become the entire story.