One True Loves

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

The hope that I clung to in that moment didn’t feel good or freeing. It felt cruel. As if the world were giving me just enough rope to hang myself.

When you lose someone you love, it’s hard to imagine that you’ll ever feel better. That, one day, you’ll manage to be in a good mood simply because the weather is nice or the barista at the coffee shop on the corner remembered your order. But it does happen. If you’re patient and you work at it.

You know this is called self-pity. You don’t care.

You imagine yourself bleeding grief, as if the water from your eyes is the pain itself. You imagine it leaving your body and being soaked up by the mattress.

Hollow and empty are terrible ways to feel when you’re used to being full of joy. But it’s not so bad when you’re used to feeling full of pain.

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.

And then, slowly, day by day, minute by minute, at such a snail’s pace that you can barely register that anything is happening at all, you find a life’s purpose again.

It all hurts so bad and feels so good that I’d swear my heart is bleeding.

The bags under her eyes look like the pocket on a kangaroo.

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?

They say that when you remember something, you are really remembering the last time you remembered it. Each time you recollect a memory, you change it, ever so slightly, shading it with new information, new feelings.