It's a Love Story

by Annabel Monaghan

You’re funny, I’d like to procreate with you, said exactly no man ever. That’s also science.

“The loud movies with the explosions and superheroes, they sell tickets because they’re an escape. We don’t have to think about our own lives when we watch them. We can hide in the noise. But it’s the quiet movies that make room for us to look at ourselves. People cooking, teaching, gardening. They’re quiet things, but they’re the things that move us. And people, mostly, are afraid of the quiet.”

“Are you in a cave?” “Darkroom.” “Ah, retirement planning.” “Don’t use my joke,” he says.

There’s a difference between someone loving you and agreeing with every single thing you do.”

“You can—wait for it—say how you actually feel.” “No.” “Yes. It’s a thing grown-up people do. Brand-new, started on TikTok.”

“When you smile at me, I feel like I want to capture it. But it’s not the regular way like when I see something beautiful and I want to photograph it. When you smile, it does something to me, I feel it in my chest, and I just want to figure out how to get you to do it again.”

This feels like wealth, I think. This is the thing you save up for. You live your whole life so that you can be surrounded by too many people in too small of a room and tell the story of how it all happened.

I understand how he loves them all fiercely, but needs space to be who he is. He doesn’t want to be mistaken for someone he’s not. He matters too much.

It feels good to want something for someone else, something that has nothing to do with you, just because you care about them. And I wonder if this is what love is.

I don’t want her to look back and feel shame; shame has been holding me back forever. I don’t want her carrying anything but total appreciation for how brave she is.

“I had this feeling, the day when we fought about that stupid movie, that I’d lost something I didn’t even understand.”

But at breakfast everything’s just as it is, in the light of day. No one wears lipstick to breakfast. And this is where you talk about your day and the part of the roof that might leak this fall. You bring your real self to breakfast.”

“I’d like to be the person who could take all of your sad things and make them happy. Like I’d hunt down each one and turn it over.” “I don’t think anyone is that person for anyone,” I say. “I don’t think so either. But I’d like to be that person for you.”