Atmosphere

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

The shuttle is not one piece of machinery. It is three. On launch, it is a rocket. In orbit, it is a spaceship. On landing, it is an airplane.

To look up at the nighttime sky is to become a part of a long line of people throughout human history who looked above at that same set of stars. It is to witness time unfolding.

People say opposites attract, but Joan had found this to almost never be true. People just couldn’t see the ways they were drawn to exactly who they feared—or hoped—they might be.

Being human was such a lonely endeavor. We alone have consciousness; we are the only intelligent life force that we know of in the galaxy. We have no one but one another.

“Sometimes I don’t know if I knew my dad or I just created a man out of thin air, as a god to pray to.”

Admitting you were afraid always took more guts than pretending you weren’t. Being willing to make a mistake got you further than never trying. The world had decided that to be fallible was weak. But we are all fallible. The strong ones are the ones who accept it.

He’d once told her she was a romantic, and she hadn’t believed him. How had he known her better than she’d known herself? The Joan he saw that day had been closer to who she was than the Joan she had seen in the mirror her entire life.

I would go so far as to say that as human beings, we are less of a who and more of a when. We are a moment in time—when all of our cells have come together in this body. But our atoms were many things before, and they will be many things after.

Not just because it’s beautiful, but because sunrise over the mountains is part of the universe itself. Everything, all of us, is God.”

It was not easy. But, oh, was it good.

This surrender had not always been easy—it had shocked Joan just how much physical pain there was in loving someone like this.

Why was it that when you let someone that far in, you learned to be okay with all the ways they saw you, even if they weren’t flattering?

She marveled at the millions of years of time Earth had existed without humans on it, at how unhurried the Earth had been to unfold.

But Joan knew she felt less buzz because she also felt no fear. There could be no danger between them when they made each other this safe.

“Let’s stay in tonight and drink this bottle and listen to records and make out,” she said. Joan had become a flake since falling in love. “Yes,” she said, “Let’s.”

“Happiness is so hard to come by. I don’t understand why anyone would begrudge anyone else for managing to find some of it.” “That’s because you’re too good for the world you love so much,” Vanessa said.

“Every morning, I wake up and I think, ‘God, yes, her.’ ”

“Persistence. Highly underrated in women. Overrated in men, but underrated in women.”

And the adults spend most of their days looking down. They fall in love and make mistakes and learn new things and feel tired. They lose people they love, and fail themselves, and change or never change. They get new jobs and fall out of love and convince themselves that if they just get this one thing, they will finally be happy.

Joan marveled at how easy Barbara’s inner life must be. How entirely undemanding of yourself it was to believe that everything happened to you.

“I mean, we have been in a relationship for three years and it’s probably incredibly obvious. In ways we can’t see.”

“I didn’t ask for this!” Vanessa shouted. “I didn’t ask to meet your niece and help you deal with your stupid sister and meet your parents and imagine a life where the two of us could have things that I never dreamed the world would let me have! I didn’t ask for that! That was you!”