The Rom-Commers

by Katherine Center

You had to maximize joy when it fluttered into your life. You had to honor it. And savor it. And not stomp it to death by reminding everyone of everything you’d lost.

I just wanted to be happy—simply, uncomplicatedly happy—for like one evening. Was that too much to ask?

“I’m not sure you understand what a big deal opportunities like this are,” I said. “You can’t take them for granted. The world is horrible. Chances to shine don’t just fall from the sky.”

How did he do it? How did he stand beside a personal Grand Canyon of suffering and manage to feel … grateful? And how on earth would I cope out in the heartless world without him? Who even was I on my own?

And I found myself wondering, as we hit some turbulence and I white-knuckled the armrest, if maybe dreams were better off never trying to become reality.

But here, all I had was a feeling. A feeling that this lost moment in time—these lost people, this lost family—was too precious to share.

“A rom-com should give you a swoony, hopeful, delicious, rising feeling of anticipation as you look forward to the moment when the two leads, who are clearly mad for each other, finally overcome all their obstacles, both internal and external, and get together.”

“A great rom-com,” I said, “is just like sex. If you’re surprised by the ending, somebody wasn’t doing their job. We all know where it’s headed. The fun is how we get there.

“But it almost made me believe in love. And I don’t believe in anything.”

“Real life doesn’t come with warnings,” Logan argued, half-assedly. “That’s why fiction,” I said, “is better than real life.”

Fiction really kind of was all I had in the romance department.

I had a theory that we gravitate toward the stories we need in life. Whatever we’re longing for—adventure, excitement, emotion, connection—we turn to stories that help us find it. Whatever questions we’re struggling with—sometimes questions so deep, we don’t even really know we’re asking them—we look for answers in stories.

And kindness is a form of emotional courage. And I’m not sure if this is common knowledge, but emotional courage is its own reward.

Maybe staying so busy was a lifeline out of my own grief. But I willingly made myself a supporting character in my own story.

His heroes were guys who got cooler in the face of fear. He wrote guys like that, but he also was a guy like that.

“Believing in things that aren’t real? Making something out of nothing? Connecting dots that don’t need or want to be connected? That’s what all the best writers do.”

There’s a joke that writers “don’t like to write—they like having written,” and that must be true of some writers. But it wasn’t true of me or Charlie. We liked the process. We liked the words. We liked playing around and trying things. We liked syllables and consonants and syncopation. We liked deciding between em dashes and commas. We liked figuring out where the story needed to go and then helping it get there.

“You want to know why you shouldn’t be worried right now?” “Why?” “Because the bad thing you’re worried about is never the bad thing that happens.” I took that in. “It’s always some other bad thing you’re not expecting. Right?

“I believe hormones exist,” Charlie said then. “And I believe kindness exists. And affection. And altruism, sometimes. And longing. And I believe that every now and then those things can show up at once and knock you out of your senses for a while. But it’s random. It’s like the weather. It’s not something we all should be aspiring to. Or counting on. It comes and it goes, whether you like it or not.

“Would you rather cancel hope altogether than risk the possibility of being disappointed?”

“I would write a hundred happy endings for us if I could.”

That’s just life. Tragedy really is a given. There are endless human stories, but they all end the same way. So it can’t be where you’re going that matters. It has to be how you get there.

It’s all about the details you notice. And the joys you savor. And the hope you refuse to give up on. It’s all about writing the very best story of your life. Not just how you live it—but how you choose to tell it.