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.

Everywhere is extraordinary

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

Good things

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.

Grief

I do think I can put the pain down. I think I can leave it on the ground and walk away, only coming back to visit every once in a while, no longer carrying it with me. Not only do I think I can do that, but I think I need to.

Grief

I felt rested and renewed, as if the earth and I were in perfect agreement about when the sun should rise.

Serenity

I’m starting to think you don’t always know what your dreams are. Some of us have to run smack into one before we see it.”

Dreams

it’s love. Pure and simple and true. But I’m no longer feeling pure, nothing is simple, and I’m no longer sure what’s true.

Love

You don’t tie yourself to something unless you’re scared you might float away.

Love

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.

Love

There is so much guilt lying around here, just waiting for me to pick it up and carry it with me. There is so much I can torture myself about.

Guilt

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?

Loss

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.

Memories

Back when I still believed that love was simple, that marriage was forever, that the world was safe to live in. Can we start again, from this very spot?

Life

When I was a kid, I loved the snow. Then when I moved to California, I used to tell people I’d never leave the sun, that I never wanted to see snow again. But now, I can’t imagine a green Christmas and I know that if I left, I would miss that feeling of coming in from the cold. I have changed over time. That’s what people do. People aren’t stagnant.

Change

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

The perception of love

I now understand why people sometimes describe the air as “bitter cold.” The cold is not bitter. They are bitter about the cold.

Bitter cold

I don’t think that true love means your only love. I think true love means loving truly. Loving purely. Loving wholly. Maybe, if you’re the kind of person who’s willing to give all of yourself, the kind of person who is willing to love with all of your heart even though you’ve experienced just how much it can hurt . . . maybe you get lots of true loves, then. Maybe that’s the gift you get for being brave.

True love

Just because something isn’t meant to last a lifetime doesn’t mean it wasn’t meant to be.

Meant to be