One True Loves

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

I had predicated my life on the idea that I wanted to see everywhere extraordinary, but I’d come to realize that extraordinary is everywhere.

You know that you will never truly be free of the grief. You know that it is something you must learn to live with, something you manage. You start to understand that grief is chronic. That it’s more about remission and relapse than it is about a cure. What that means to you is that you can’t simply wait for it to be over. You have to move through it, like swimming in an undertow.

You are happier to have known him than you are sad to have lost him.

Good things don’t wait until you’re ready. Sometimes they come right before, when you’re almost there.

I decided to no longer wonder what would have happened if things had worked out differently. And instead, I would focus on what was in front of me. I would focus on reality instead of asking myself questions about fictions.

When you love someone, it seeps out of everything you do, it bleeds into everything you say, it becomes so ever-present, that eventually it becomes ordinary to hear, no matter how extraordinary it is to feel.

But then I realize that staying still doesn’t actually pause time, it’s still passing, life is still happening. You have to keep moving.

“If you want my two cents, you have the unique ability to love with your whole heart even after it’s been broken. That’s a good thing. Don’t feel guilty about that.”

Do you ever get over loss? Or do you just find a box within yourself, big enough to hold it? Do you just stuff it in there, push it down, and snap the lid on it? Do you just work, every day, to keep the box shut?

But I guess that’s why true love is so alluring in the first place. It’s hard to find and hold on to, like all beautiful things. Like gold, saffron, or an aurora borealis.

We are two people who are madly in love with our old selves. And that is not the same as being in love.

The same hearts, broken twice.

“Do you realize that we were both looking out at the same ocean looking for each other?”

“We loved each other and we lost each other. And now, even though we still love each other, the pieces don’t fit like they used to.”

Don’t ever let anyone tell you the most romantic part of love is the beginning. The most romantic part is when you know it has to end.

Falling out of love with someone you still like feels exactly like lying in a warm bed and hearing the alarm clock. No matter how good you feel right now, you know it’s time to go.

I don’t think that true love means your only love. I think true love means loving truly. Loving purely. Loving wholly.