Given Our History: A Novel

by Kristyn J. Miller

he said he wanted to research, not teach, because he didn’t think he had the people skills for it. But we all end up teaching in the end.

Rate My Professors, before they realized that allowing students to score professors on their attractiveness was wildly inappropriate.

Back in the good ol' days. 😂

extending an olive branch only for the other person to set it on fire,

no such thing as bad words. Just bad intentions.”

Need—that’s a funny word. There was a time when I thought that I needed him like I needed oxygen, that everything would come crumbling down if I wasn’t able to call him every night before bed, every time I had a fight with my mom or bombed an exam. It was a naïve, childlike understanding of what it meant to love someone, 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.

“If people only volunteered when it benefitted them, I think the world would be a little worse off.”

“There’s no such thing as bad words,” I pointed out. “Just bad intentions.”

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

Falling in love was like falling asleep on a road trip: you let yourself get comfortable and then suddenly you wake up and you’re already there. Falling out of love, in contrast, was like a car crash: you slam on the brakes, but you don’t just stop, because the momentum is still there. And years later, you might’ve recovered, but you still have the little aches and pains, and maybe you’re a little scared every time you hop back behind the wheel, because look what happened before.

“Sometimes people drift apart because the timing’s not right, but if they’re meant to be together, they find their way back to each other in the end.”

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.”

“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.”

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.