One True Loves

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

I wasn’t like anyone else. I was worried that I wasn’t like her.

Marie liked everyone and everyone liked Marie. She was the Golden Child, the one destined to be our parents’ favorite.

Also not entirely selfless was my willingness to rewatch Titanic every few weeks as Olive tried to figure out if she liked watching the sex scene between Jack and Rose because she was attracted to Leonardo DiCaprio or Kate Winslet.

balm, and applied it to her lips. As if it wasn’t bad enough she was holding his hand, she had the audacity to let go of it. I hated her then. I hated her soccer-playing, headband-wearing, Dr-Pepper-flavored-lip-balm-applying guts.

Adults love to tell teenagers that “one day” and “sooner or later” plenty of things are going to happen. They love to say that things happen “before you know it,” and they really love to impart how fast time “flies by.”

“If we hurry, we can get home in time to take a disco nap.” “What is a disco nap?” Sam asked. “Don’t, Sam; it’s a trap,” I said. Sam laughed. I never really made people laugh.

Lmaoooo

“Yeah, but I’m not a fish. I do exist outside of the water,” he teased.

I didn’t mind any of that. Because that was the summer Jesse and I fell in love.

It was nine years after he kissed me that first time in the Acton Police Station. “Jesse . . .” I said. “Will you marry me?”

“I snuck back and bought it when you went looking for a bathroom that night,” he said. My eyes went wide. “You’ve had this ring for five years?”

It was the happiest day of my life. Emma and Jesse. Forever. Three hundred and sixty-four days later, he was gone.

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.

The commercial flight made it to Anchorage. The Cessna made it to Akun Island. But the first time they took the helicopter out, it never came back. The best anyone could conclude was it went down somewhere over the North Pacific. The four people on board were lost. My husband, my one true love . . . Gone.

“That’s crazy. Jesse didn’t die. He wouldn’t do that.”

But I couldn’t respond. I had to stand there and watch for Jesse. It was my duty, as his wife. I had to be the first to spot him when he made landfall.

I lost hope and love and all of my kindness. I told my mom that I wanted to die. I said it even though I knew it would hurt her to hear it. I had to say it because of how much it hurt to feel it.

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.

The day your new license comes you cry and look up to the sky, as if Jesse is there, and you say, “This doesn’t mean I don’t love you. This just means I love where I come from.”

“Look. I thought you were a salesperson. You ask your dad how to hit on women. We’re like the Tweedledee and Tweedledum of social interaction.” He laughed. He looked so relieved.

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

I had never been so excited and so sick to my stomach at the same time.

But realizing you want love in your life means you have to be willing to let love in. And that meant I needed to let Jesse go.

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

“Emma . . .” he said seriously. “Yeah?” “Can we get burritos?”

“That’s funny, because my family invented tres leches right here in the United States.” I laughed. “And I personally invented baklava.”

“I think it’s a good sign, though,” he said, “that I was crazy about you at sixteen and I’m still crazy about you now.”

“What I’m saying is that loving you—even if I’m not sure you love me—it’s familiar territory,” he said. “I’ve picked it right back up like riding a bike. And I can do it for a little while longer, if that’s what you need.”

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

“Emma Blair, if you ever decide that you want to marry me, please tell me. Because I would like to marry you.”

The first thought that popped into my head was, This is too soon. But then the second thought was, I think I deserve to be happy.

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.

What Sam and I have . . . it’s love. Pure and simple and true.

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

I begin to get anxious. Jesse’s plane lands in four hours. Jesse, my Jesse, will be home today.

He was probably living off of coconuts and talking to volleyballs.”

why I thought I could ever love anyone the way I love him. Because it has been him. My whole life.

“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.”

Mozart walks into the kitchen and then turns around, as if he knows he doesn’t want to be here for this.

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 am, instantaneously, overcome with certainty. I don’t want to leave Sam. I don’t want to lose the life I’ve built. Not again. I love Sam. I love him. I don’t want to leave him. I want to sit down together at the piano and play “Chopsticks.”

If loving them both makes me a bad person, I think I’m just a bad person then.

Sam sent me a picture of a cat sitting on a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and I laughed for, like, fifteen minutes.

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?

After all, Jesse has a box, too. And his is packed tighter than mine.

This is what I want. This is what I’ve always wanted. I will always want this.

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 beat yourself up,” he says. “Some people just have a natural raw talent for snow art. And I’m one of them.”

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 hope that when I tell him he’s the one I want, he believes me.

I am Emma Blair. Bookstore owner. Sister. Daughter. Aunt. Amateur pianist. Cat lover. New Englander. Woman who wants to marry Sam Kemper.