It's a Love Story

by Annabel Monaghan

There’s nothing that makes a person act more insane than trying to prove how sane they actually are.

Dan gets under my skin. And honestly, the whole purpose of skin is to keep things out.

“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.”

I would cast him as a vampire. The kind that wouldn’t kill you but might break the bed.

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

“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.

Love isn’t a helicopter ride to Catalina; it’s everyday care and treating the other person like they’re your house keys.

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.

“What does that mean?” I say. “If you don’t mind me asking. ‘Love happens over breakfast.’ ” “It’s just something Cormack said when we were first married. Romance happens over dinner. The candlelight, the wine.” “Everyone looks a lot better than they usually do,” Cormack says and laughs. Reenie rolls her eyes. “Well, yes,” she says. “That’s the romance of it. 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.”