Let's Pretend This Will Work

by Maddie Dawson

she tells me that I’m in line for a big, happy life that’s going to zigzag in directions I never would have dreamed of, as long as I stay open to it. Love, she says, is my natural state—and I am going to be fabulous and creative, and love will bloom all around me.

Trying too hard never works with young people. They need to be treated like hostile, dangerous jungle cats who will slash you if you so much as make uninvited eye contact.

Don’t get married to someone who requires that you act quote, unquote, ‘normal’ in order to please him, okay? You don’t have to be anybody’s idea of normal. You’re wonderful and you’re an acquired taste, not just some generic woman who might be a match for just any old random guy.

I might have arrived on earth already a little broken, a little overemotional, and without the wiring necessary to make small talk.

He shakes his head. He is very close to me, and we’re both laughing, and then he does the most extraordinary thing. He reaches over and touches my lips. “There’s some secret sauce here,” he says. He’s looking into my eyes. And then he leans in just a bit closer and kisses me very quickly and softly on the mouth. Both of us are shocked, I think. He draws back and says, “Sorry! Good God in heaven! What am I doing?”

“Well, I just think that when that first love comes along, it brings with it a huge thunderclap of feeling—something so amazing that we get overwhelmed with it. And that it’s tempting to think that it’s the only love there ever could be in the world. But then it ends. Most of the time it ends. And then, a long time later, we look back and see that that whole experience of love was just a little kiddie pool we were paddling around in. And that actually a really huge ocean awaits us.”

I think that when you see bitter people out in the world, people who’ve been married for forty years and they tell you that love isn’t really real, that it never works out, those are the people who settled for the kiddie pool, and it dried up, and they never knew what was really out there for them. Saddest thing in the world.”

“Okay. I’m terrified that I might be making the huge mistake of kind of falling in love with you, and you’re then going to tell me that nope, it’s that grandstanding blowhard that you really love, and I won’t be able to recover. My heart has seen a lot of action, you know.” I blink at him. “Did you actually just say you love me?” “Wait. Back up here. I believe what I said was that I might be kind of falling in love with you. That was not a definitive. Also I believe I qualified it by saying it would be a mistake.”