Given Our History: A Novel

by Kristyn J. Miller

Her crimson-tinted mouth drops open. “Dude. I’m so jealous. I was like, five. I wasn’t even born when The Black Parade came out.” Great. On top of everything else, I’ve now been made aware that the infamous opening G note—the calling card of all former emo kids—is officially old enough to buy itself a pack of cigarettes.

“I didn’t remember him being so good-looking. A couple of the girls in class already nicknamed him ‘Professor Hottison.’”

because the truth, as it turns out, is that you don’t need anyone. You can love them with all your heart, but you don’t need them. When they walk away, you don’t stop breathing. The world keeps spinning, and life goes on.

He’s quiet for a beat, staring at the pavement as we make our way to my car. “If people only volunteered when it benefitted them, I think the world would be a little worse off.”

After a long couple of seconds, he took off the headphones, mussing his dark curls. “I’ll have to burn you a CD,” was all he said, handing me the player back. I cracked a small smile. “You’ll send me music, and I’ll send you books.”

It was safer this way. Better to preserve what we already had than risk ruining it by admitting to something I could never take back. Something that didn’t quite fit into his careful life plan. It was only a crush. It would probably go away.

“One girl’s heartbreak is another girl’s Lizzie McGuire Movie.”

The hardest part about loving someone is, in my experience, stopping.

Maybe, if you were careful, you wouldn’t have to struggle to hold it all together, even as your life was coming apart at the seams.

But it occurs to me that I am very much in danger of the thing I’ve been most afraid of: loving a man who knows better than to open his heart to me again.

The whole idea of building a better life, making sure it all goes according to plan, it’s all wasted if you miss out on the things that made that future worth building in the first place.”

“I agree that people haven’t changed,” he continues. “People don’t change, really. But I think that’s one of the worst things about us. Here we are, with entire histories at our fingertips, answers to all your questions only a Google search away, but the reality is that people never learn a goddamn thing.”

“You’re always there, Clara. In everything I do. You’ve always been it, for me. Tell me you don’t feel the same.”

It’s a little melodramatic, all things considered—the advisory board hasn’t directly insulted me. Or maybe they have, but c’est la vie, because when you’re a young woman in academia, there’s bound to be some old guy lurking around the next office over, looking for an excuse to call you incompetent. Inexperienced. Whatever.

“love is the hard road. The person you’re meant to be with is whoever you choose to be with. And you’ll have to fight for it and make sacrifices for it every step of the way. You just have to choose someone who’s worth all that trouble, and then you have to keep on choosing them, every day.”

He draws back again, dark brown eyes flitting around my face. “And my best friend.” “We didn’t talk for nine years,” I say softly. I’m not sure I’ve earned it. “Doesn’t matter.” He puts on a mock-serious tone. “The cool thing about best friends is that you get to decide who you think deserves the title.”

“Speaking of old friends,” Teddy says, with a pointed look at Izzy, “Darvish sends his love.” “Rejected,” Izzy says, though she can’t hold back a grin. “Return to sender. Wrong address.”

I know our own history is imperfect, but I’m glad it eventually led me back to you. Abraham Lincoln once said, “We learn from history that we do not learn from history.” Or maybe that was Georg Hegel. Either way, I disagree. It might’ve taken me a while, but I learned just fine, and what I learned most is that I will do whatever it takes not to lose you, this time around. I’m all in.

I’ve spent so long dwelling on the past, wishing I could erase all the negative and do it over, but perhaps if our lives had gone any differently, we wouldn’t have ended up where we are today. And I’m happy with where we are. There’s no bad guy in our story, no one person who wronged any more than the other. There’s just … life. Sometimes it’s messy and complicated, and sometimes there are forks in the road, anticipated and not.