One True Loves

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

And just like that, I sent Sam Kemper straight into the friend zone.

Oh god por sam

They understood gay and they understood straight but they did not understand Olive.

“Emma?” he said softly. “Are you okay?” I didn’t even know that he knew my name and there he was, saying it as if it were his to say.

“Do you ever feel like everyone is always telling you who you are?” he asked me. “Like, people are acting as if they know better than you what you’re good at or who you are supposed to be?” “Yeah,”

said. “If you want to do something, you have to do it.” “What? That doesn’t even make sense.” “Of course it does. If you want something as passionately as you clearly want this, that means you owe it to yourself to make it happen. That’s what I’m doing.

“You know, you’re nothing like I imagined you’d be.” “What do you mean?” I asked him. It was hard for me to believe that Jesse had thought about me before, that he even knew I existed before tonight. “I don’t know; you’re just . . . different.” “In a good way or a bad way?” “Oh, definitely a good way,” he said, nodding. “For sure.”

“Why would she think that?” “I don’t know. Because she was always jealous when girls looked at me. And you must have looked at me once. And it made her think that.” “But, I mean, you believed her.” “Well, I mean, I hoped she was right.” “Why?” “What do you mean, ‘why’?” “Why did you hope that she was right? Did you want me to have a crush on you?”

And then he leaned over when no one was looking and he kissed me.

Sam moved to Boston two weeks ahead of schedule and never said good-bye. But I didn’t mind any of that. Because that was the summer Jesse and I fell in love.

I stared again. But the ring on my finger was much less interesting to me than the man who had given it to me.

“I knew I was going to marry you. What was the point of waiting to buy you some diamond when I knew exactly what you wanted?”

Our friendship had been a long-distance one since we went off to college. But I never met another woman who meant to me what she did. No one else could make me laugh like she could. So my oldest friend remained my best friend,

despite however many miles kept us apart, and it was for that reason that I made her my maid of honor.

As Jesse pushed up against me, as I pressed my body against his, it felt different from all the other times we’d done it. It meant more.

“I have something really important to tell you,” he said. “Are you ready? It’s really important. It’s breaking news.” “Tell me.” “I’ll love you forever.” “I already knew that,” I said. “And I’ll love you forever, too.” “Yeah?” “Yeah,” I said. “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.”

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

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.

And the only thing that shocked me more than realizing it was realizing I had never realized it before.

on some level, I could just sense the looming tragedy in my bones,

the way that some dogs can tell a hurricane is coming.

Jesse didn’t call to wish me a happy...

:'(

I cried when no one was around and I found it hard to look in the mirror, but I kept telling everyone that we would find Jesse soon.

Omg ouch

Jesse is coming back, Marie. And I am going to sit here and wait until he does. Because I know my husband. I know how incredible he is. And I’m not going to allow you to make me feel like he’s anything less just because you like it better when I feel small.”

I cried for him, and for what I’d lost, and for every day left of my life that I had left to live without him.

The world seemed so dark and bleak and meaningless. Life seemed so pointless, so cruel.

I

Im crying!

When you lose someone you love, it’s hard to imagine that you’ll ever feel better. That, one day, you’ll manage to be in a good mood simply because the weather is nice or the barista at the coffee shop on the corner remembered your order. But it does happen. If you’re patient and you work at it.

Why is this making me sob so bad god

You wonder how it’s possible Marie got everything she ever wanted and you . . . ended up here. You know this is called self-pity. You don’t care.

you aren’t alive anymore. Because Jesse isn’t.

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.

you realize that Jesse is gone but maybe your life is still here. Maybe you can do something with it.

When they tell you that you’re great at your job, you start crying and you miss Jesse.

Happy moments are the worst, that’s when the ache is strongest. But you wipe your eyes, get back to work, and when you put your head on the pillow that night, you consider it a good day.

You are happier to have known him than you are sad to have lost him.

But it turns out you do. That’s what makes you happy. And then you say to yourself, Wait, no, that’s not right. I can’t be happy.

Because you don’t have him. He’s gone. You can’t be happy, can you? And then you stop and truly ask yourself, Am I happy?

And just by walking into a music store, you set a whole second life in motion.

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

The memory of you hurt so much at first. The more I thought about your smile, your smell, the more it hurt. But I liked punishing myself. I liked the pain because the pain was you.

I’m so sorry that we never got the future we talked about. Our life together would have been grand.

I hope you know how beautiful and freeing it was to love you when you were here. You were the love of my life.

No one ever talks about that. But in that moment, I felt like flirting was the very thing that made the world go around. The excitement of wondering what the other person will say next. The thrill of knowing someone is looking at you, liking what they see. The rush of looking at someone and liking what you see in them. Flirting is probably just as much about falling in love with yourself as it is with someone else.

Sam listened as if I was the most fascinating woman in the universe and I realized how long it had been since someone listened to me like that.

That’s when I knew that Sam was sincerely listening, that he was interested in learning exactly who I was in that moment. I realized that Sam understood me, maybe had always understood me, in a way that very few people did. And that meant that he knew that two years was both forever and just a moment ago.

“I just wasn’t the same person at thirty that I was at twenty,” he said. “And neither was she.” “I don’t think anybody is,”

Sam always seemed to have a grasp on what was truly important. He never seemed bogged down by petty things. He prioritized the heart of the situation over the details. He paid attention to actions more than words.

skin. “I don’t expect you to stop loving him just because you love me.”

think you and I have something that could last for a very long time, Emma. Maybe I even knew that back in high school, maybe that’s why I was as infatuated with you as I was. But I feel—I have always felt—more myself with you than anyone I’ve ever met. And for the first time, I’m starting to see what it would mean to grow with someone, as opposed to merely growing beside someone, the way I did with Aisha. I’m not worried about our future, the way I thought I’d be when I fell in love again. I’m OK just being with you and seeing where it goes. I just want you to

Im crying moreeee

know that if what we have lasts, and one day we talk about getting married or having kids, I want you to know I’ll never try to replace Jesse. I’ll never ask you to stop loving him. You can love your past with him. My love for you now isn’t threatened by that. I just . . . I want you to know that I’ll never ask you to choose. I’ll never ask you to tell me I’m your one true love. I know, for someone like you, that isn’t fair. And I’ll never ask it.”