One True Loves

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

When you look back on your own timeline, there’s a sharp spike somewhere along the way, some event that changed you, changed your life, more than the others.

“If you want to do something, you have to do it.”

I was madly in love with him and had been for as long as I could remember. We had a deep and meaningful history together.

“I’ll love you until we’re so old we can barely walk on our own and we have to get walkers and put those cut-up yellow tennis balls on them. I’ll love you past that, actually. I’ll love you until the end of time.”

Just two people in love with each other, in love with the world.

“You are my one true love. I don’t even think I’m capable of loving anyone else.”

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

“And I was lucky enough to find you twice.”

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.

That every single person on this planet could lose their one true love and live to love again? It means the one you love could love again if they lost you.

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

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.”