The Ex Vows

by Jessica Joyce

“But that promotion is in Seattle.”

Seattle is not San Francisco. Seattle is in Washington, eight hundred miles away. I’m fated mates with the Bay Area—I was born here, grew up here. My apartment is here, my friends and my dad, too, though I rarely see him thanks to his thirty-years-and-running devotion to his job as a public defender.

We have to talk about Eli because he’s been Adam’s best friend since our sophomore year of high school and he’s the best man at his wedding,

He’s Adam’s best friend, yes, but he’s been everything to me: a stranger when he walked into our lives thirteen years ago. A friend. My best friend. My boyfriend, college and then live-in when he asked me to move to New York with him. Then, fifteen months later, a stranger again.

Blake Williams, Jamie’s girlfriend,

Adam turns to us, lit up, and blurts, “Okay, thank god, I hate secrets. Grace is pregnant.”

With the real Eli, work always comes first. And with the real me, showing people I need them comes last.

Eli started his analyst training program

I’d started as an HR coordinator at a beauty company

It’s a gift to know someone when you’re in love with them, and a curse when you’re out of it.

It’s been more than five years since Eli’s called me that. Since he’s sounded like he cares.

“Well, I saw the way he was looking at you when you came in.” Sarika shoots me an encouraging smile. “It was like you were the only person on the planet.”

But while he was trying to fix what was broken in his past, he was breaking something that was right in front of him.

I just know that when Eli wraps his arms around my waist following a brief hesitation, it feels like coming home after the longest time away.

It’s twenty-eight-year-old Eli,

The fifteen-year-old boy I liked and the twenty-year-old man I loved, and the twenty-eight-year-old I have to keep right here, because at one point he was the twenty-three-year-old man who broke my heart.

“I’ve been doing this for twenty-three years and I’ve discovered it’s usually the imperfections that make people fall in love.

“Anyone who could leave you doesn’t deserve you in the first place.”

“Relationships are messy, but that’s how you know they’re real. Blake and I have shown each other every ugly piece of ourselves and she still loves me. She loves me more for it, in fact. Sometimes you have to cut yourself open, Georgia, and you hold yourself so tightly.”

“But you deserve to let yourself feel whatever you need to. You can be messy. A disaster, if you need to. The people who love you will accept every single piece of it, I promise you.”

You’re not afraid of anything, because you know you’ve got one another. It’s such an honor to witness.”

“When I say I’m still in love with you, I mean the first time I saw you and right now. I mean every second in between.”

“I miss you and I’m in love with you and I hate being friends with you, if we’re being honest. It fucking blows.”

Because you panic under pressure, but you’re magic so you make magic happen anyway.

Because you don’t want me to say goodbye this morning. You don’t know yet that with us it’s never goodbye. But you will, I promise.

I love him because he finds beautiful moments even in the hardest of times. Because of his determination and dedication to the things and people he loves.

It’s a privilege to have someone trust you enough to show you those pieces of themselves, the most vulnerable and tender, the least polished. It’s a show of trust to let you see them first thing in the morning, in the middle of a panic attack, right after they’ve cried. To give you a shaky smile after a messy fight. To come back to you again and again with their heart in their hands.

Our circumstances are messy, but so is life. It doesn’t mean that we can’t love each other through it. We already are.

“No, but I spent all day—the past seven weeks, actually—wishing you were here and thinking about how much I hate being your friend, and then Adam called me to tell me someone was at the door—”

“And it was you. It’s not bad, it’s amazing. It just makes me feel like my heart is going to explode, and that’s very unsettling.”

“What do you want?” “Everything,” I choke out. “All the good stuff and the messy stuff and even the bad stuff. I want all of it.”

I was wrong when I said before that we’re only good at loving each other when it’s easy. I think we’re good at loving each other out loud when it is, but we’ve silently loved each other through all of the hard stuff.”

“I’m trying to be better about saying hard things. It’s scary, though.”

“I just stared at him while all this shit flew through my head—that I was on my way to being him, someone who had nothing but his work, who went home to an empty house, who would die with a shit ton of money in the bank but no one there to hold his hand.”

But I want a life that makes me happy. I want something that’s going to feel right, not just give me financial stability.

Time is a miracle. It shows you what you had, and sometimes it brings it back to you. Different. Better.