Let's Pretend This Will Work

by Maddie Dawson

“Surely I don’t have to explain to you the difference between kissing and sex, emotionwise,” he says. “And you’re welcome for the cake.”

“It just seems that one is a gateway drug to the other, and it’s not fair for us not to get to have the whole experience.” I can’t believe I’m saying these things to him.

look at her and see all the waves of goodwill radiating from her, and I remember that there is not one solid reason for me not to like her. She’s a nice person.

She wants to help two of my favorite people with their lives.

All in all, there’s no way around it: this is a major triumph.

“I told you. I’m more ready than you would believe. I’m just careful with my heart. This is too important to risk plunging in too soon.” But how can things work out if we’re both being so careful with our hearts? Seems to me that somebody’s got to throw their heart into the air and see how it lands.

I let myself realize the thing I’ve not been allowing in. I miss sex. I miss the feeling of loving and being held. And is this crazy? I miss the deliciousness of Ren. The availability. The willingness.

“If you’re going to freak out over every little apparent setback in your life, you’re not going to enjoy life as much as you could be,” she says and

actually laughs. “How about you just try to remember that it’s all going to work out, and don’t sweat the details. Just sit back and be curious, why don’t you?”

I loved how we were always on the verge of having things slide into complete anarchy and having to come up with a way of saving things at the last second, reasoning with toddlers.

“They’re my family! They’re Alice’s family!” he says. “You don’t really have a family, so you don’t know

what it’s like. You make sacrifices for family. That’s what people do.”

Is that true, that I don’t have a family so I don’t know how to sacrifice? Is that what all this is about, why I’m so desperate right now? What I have, I realize suddenly, is myself. Am I really all alone? I draw myself up just so I won’t start crying. “If family is a bunch of people who get to control you and tell you how to make a living and how to raise your kid and when to eat and when to sleep, then I’m glad I don’t have one. I always thought family was supposed to be the people ...

“Letting go is the most wonderful feeling,”

And the bridegrooms lifted the veils from their brides’ faces with trembling fingers before the all-important kiss after they were pronounced “man and wife.” I always thought it looked like she was being unwrapped, as if she were simply a package that had just been delivered. That whole image used to make me shiver with delight, but now, not so much.

“But that’s the way family gets made,” I say. “You mush people all together, and it turns out to be interesting and exciting . . . and sometimes real love and feeling bloom right there in front of you.”

But this is just what being in a relationship means. Everybody knows this. It takes patience and sacrifice. You feel misunderstood sometimes. You feel alone even when you’re with the person who means the most to you. You just smile, and you go on. It’s life. And life has tradeoffs.

“Fair warning here: I’m a modern woman, and modern women don’t have to take their husbands’ names.” He sighs. Put upon. “Whatever you want,” he says. “Take it, leave it, hyphenate it, take it out and stomp on it. I just want us to make things official at some point. I want you to belong to me. Get it?”

The truth, as told by La Starla, is that the path you’re on may simply be a little detour that leads you to the real path you’re supposed to be on, where all your happiness is hanging out, waiting for you.

I told him that I love thrift shops and old paintings and pole lamps and rugs that I have to lug home through the streets. Everything he kind of hates, although I didn’t say that part because he would just try to deny it.

she asked us all to concentrate on magic

and the universe and the incredible miracles that wait for us around every corner if we just have the sense to look for them and pay attention.

La Starla was pointing out that there is no joy that can even come close to being your weird, strange self and having people love you for just who you are,

I understood something I didn’t know before—how grief and love can show up in the same moment and be quite

comfortable together.