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.

“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.”

“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?”

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.

“Oh my God, Mimi, I love you, too, you know I love you,” he says. “You are the ocean and the seagulls. Also, the sky. And probably the kelp and all the grains of sand, too.

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.

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.

“I promise to love you and your beautiful little Alice forever and ever,” I said.