One True Loves

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

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.

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.

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.

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

“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.”

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