Same As It Ever Was

by Claire Lombardo

Audi people or Aldi people.

You could get used to not having someone in your life but you could never completely stop wanting them there.

She’d done everything she was supposed to do, and yet here she was, alone—and she liked being alone, and was good at being alone, but she’d started to feel too alone, like everyone else had figured out something she hadn’t and begun to leave her behind.

She was good, she had learned in the last decade, at blowing people off. It was surprising how easy it was to let other people forget about you, and how hard it was to stop being by yourself once you started, and so she’d just begun to accept it as a fact:

Things usually do work out, Ollie. They’re almost never as huge as we think they’re going to be.”

that it was easier to get mad at someone than to tell them you were scared.

There aren’t enough hours in the day to tell each other everything, and there’s also, in a marriage, simply not enough context; there is not always enough common ground; there will always be spots where you don’t align, pockets where you can’t both fit.