We Can't Keep Meeting Like This

by Rachel Lynn Solomon

“Okay. Excellent. Sorry. I have really bad social anxiety. Like… do you ever get home from hanging out with people and immediately start analyzing everything you did and convincing yourself all of it was completely wrong? I’m positive at any given time that eighty percent of my friends don’t actually like me.”

Same

“I’m eighty percent sweat right now,” I inform him. “Ten percent ginger ale, and ten percent Whitney Houston songs.”

“That would be a groom whose friends thought it would be hilarious to shave off his eyebrows the morning of the wedding.”

This sounds familiar? I think it's from Four Aunties book. Will have to check.

“We can’t keep meeting like this.”

“And sometimes the world is terrible, and love stories… They make it feel less heavy.”

“I guess I can’t argue with that,” I say as we head outside, Seattle flirting with dusk. “About wanting something to make the world feel less heavy.”

Quinn, I’m sorry we couldn’t figure it out last summer, but I’m glad you gave this a chance. —Tarek

“Even if it does hurt them,” Tarek says, “that hurt isn’t going to last forever. Isn’t it better to tell them sooner as opposed to having it keep building? Wouldn’t it hurt less that way, for all of you?”

Is that really such an awful thing, to be liked?”

“You think you can avoid being hurt just because you don’t put a label on it? Because I have news for you. We’re in a relationship. We have been all summer. You can call it whatever you want or you can call it nothing”—he puts a sharp emphasis on that word—“but that doesn’t make you exempt from getting hurt. We’re all hurting, Quinn. In different ways, some that we can treat with medication and therapy and some only with time. And some in ways that might never heal. Sometimes the good outweighs the bad. Sometimes those great times are so fucking great that they make the bad times a little easier to handle.”

“How do you convince yourself that it’s worth it?” I ask, voice shaking. “Even knowing it might end in disaster someday?” “You take a chance,” she says simply, like it really is that easy to close your eyes and leap. “And you hope the other person takes the same one.”

“I like you,” I say in a small voice. I’m not sure I’m ready for what comes after that. The other word is too foreign, too grand. “You know I like you. Why can’t that be enough?” “Because I—I loved you, okay?” He presses his lips together, like he didn’t mean to say it. I loved you. That word does something to my heart. I loved you. Past tense. “I loved you for a while, knowing you didn’t feel the same way,” he continues. “Then, when I thought there might be a chance, you confirmed over and over that you were never going to return those feelings. You went out of your way to tell me, even when we were doing all these things that made us feel like a couple. It was a mindfuck, Quinn.”

“I forced myself to be fine with it, but I’m not anymore. And I’ll gladly accept some of the responsibility here. It’s my fault too. I wanted too much that you weren’t going to give, and I’ve accepted that. Maybe we can even be friends again, one day. But right now I can’t be around you.”

“Love is frightening. I should know, because I keep running away from it. But someone like Asher—she loves so fully, so seemingly without fear. It’s hard not to admire her for it. “When you’re in love, whether that love is platonic or romantic, you get to be the fullest version of yourself, uncertainties and mistakes and all. You get to be that version of yourself—because it’s a privilege, really, to open up that much, even when it’s challenging. And it is going to be challenging sometimes, especially if you’re not used to being your whole self. Especially if your whole self is something of a mystery, even to you.”

“When you’re in love, you want to spend time with that person not just on your good days, but your in-between days and your bad days too. You want to try new things and indulge in the coziness of familiar ones. And if you ever feel like you’re on the verge of losing that person, you’d pull a grand gesture to get them back. The kind of grand gesture you’ve only seen in romantic comedies. Maybe you’d ask a guy who lives on a houseboat if he’ll meet you on top of the Empire State Building, even if you’ve never spoken to him in real life.”

This earns me a laugh, and I want to pluck the sound from the air and tuck it next to my heart.

I assumed I could show up and that would solve everything, but that’s not what a grand gesture is about, is it? It’s never one big gesture. It’s a series of small ways to let someone know you care about them.

“It’s not about the gestures,” he says. “The gesture doesn’t mean anything if the couple isn’t right for each other. It’s about the person.” A swallow, and then, as his knee taps mine: “You make it grand.”