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.

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

I once thought grief was chronic, that all you could do was appreciate the good days and take them along with the bad. And then I started to think that maybe the good days aren’t just days; maybe the good days can be good weeks, good months, good years. Now I wonder if grief isn’t something like a shell. You wear it for a long time and then one day you realize you’ve outgrown it. So you put it down.

Flirting is probably just as much about falling in love with yourself as it is with someone else.

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?

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

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.

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