It's a Love Story

by Annabel Monaghan

(I’d later think that the laugh track is to a live audience what porn is to sex. It can sound the same from the next room, but really, it’s not the same at all.)

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.

“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.”