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I could feel the red in my cheeks. It was never pink with me, never a rosy blush, but always beet red like I was a sickly Victorian child with scarlet fever.
“My life is a slow-moving tragic comedy.”
“The only way to live is with a drink in both hands.” I
“Yes, to answer your question, I have always been excessively dramatic.”
“How do you know her again?” Stella asked. I watched Emme help the karate-kicker tuck a disaster of papers in his desk. When she was finished, she gave me a nod. I felt my lips turning up into a smile. The obvious answer was from back home, from high school, from ninth-grade biology, from listening to music in her car during lunch all of senior year so I didn’t have to talk to anyone. But I heard myself say, “She’s my favorite thing in the world.”
I felt…special. I had a hard time trusting that emotion because it had a terrible way of proving itself to be an illusion but he’d remembered the books, the plants, all of it. He’d remembered me.
“Don’t invent bad solutions to things that aren’t problems.
wanted to pry my ribs open and show her my heart because I’d swear to god it only beat like this for her.
I didn’t have any big reason for it other than the fact I didn’t trust most people enough to be completely vulnerable in that way.
“I see him and all I can think about is the mess he left behind, and I’m furious. I’m furious that he took so much from me and I’m furious that I let him. That a year of my life is gone but he gave up nothing. He walked away without a scratch on him and went on to convince this girl it was actually her fault he’d cheated.”
“It’s hard to keep being strong when nothing lasts. I feel like I never stop putting myself back together. Always starting over. Every time I think I’m okay, something new falls apart. It’s everything, everyone.
“I didn’t realize how bad it was with him until it was over,” she whispered. “I thought it was good enough.”
“What I did to you was inexcusable and I won’t ask for your forgiveness. But I want you to hear me say that I was wrong. I wasn’t the father you deserved. I’ve earned all the distance between us. My behaviors are the reason you are not in my life and I regret it everyday, but I understand it was the only choice you could make. I don’t blame you for a minute of it.”
I’d thought I knew what it meant to love Emme, but that was like a pantomime of love.
“You know that’s not the case.” She tossed the pillow aside. “That’s just something I say because I’m disgustingly dramatic and I’m still patching up my childhood traumas.”
