One True Loves

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

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

I want you to know I’ll never try to replace Jesse. I’ll never ask you to stop loving him. You can love your past with him. My love for you now isn’t threatened by that. I just . . . I want you to know that I’ll never ask you to choose. I’ll never ask you to tell me I’m your one true love. I know, for someone like you, that isn’t fair. And I’ll never ask it.”

I don’t know how I got so lucky to have both of you. My two true loves.

It’s been seven weeks since I found out that Jesse was alive.

“Just . . . just do me a favor.” “Anything.” “Don’t stay with me if you want to be with him,” he says. “Don’t do that to me.”

It feels like our entire past together spans eons and the time I’ve spent without him is an insignificant little flash.

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

“I’m saying that I have spent the last three and a half years of my life hoping with everything I have in me to see you again. And if you think that you being engaged to someone else is going to stop me from putting our life back together, you’ve lost your goddamn mind.”

“It’s like I’m eighteen all over again,” he says. “I love you and I have you and now I’m terrified I’m going to lose you to Jesse for the second time.”

But I only meant it in theory. Because ever since I heard he was back, I haven’t been happy for you. Or even really that happy for him. I’ve been heartsick. For me.”

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.

“I’m different, Jesse. I was in my twenties when you left. I’m thirty-one now. I don’t care about Los Angeles and writing travel pieces anymore. I care about my family. I care about my bookstore. I’m not the same as I was when you left. The loss of you changed me. I changed.”

It would mean so much if Jesse wanted to fall in love with who I am today. If he opened up and let me fall in love with the truth about who he is now. But none of that happens.

People aren’t stagnant. We evolve in reaction to our pleasures and our pains.

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

What has happened to us is no one’s fault—neither of us did anything wrong—but when Jesse left, life took us in opposite directions and turned us into different people. We grew apart because we were apart.

I could make myself fit for him. He could make himself fit for me. But that’s not true love.

Maybe true love is warming someone up from the cold, or tenderly brushing a hair away, because you care about them with every bone in your body even though you know what’s between you won’t last.

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 left work after fifth period today because I was considering teaching the jazz band how to play ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart.’ I’m heartbroken without you.

Just because something isn’t meant to last a lifetime doesn’t mean it wasn’t meant to be. We were meant to have been.”