We Can't Keep Meeting Like This

by Rachel Lynn Solomon

It’s not even a smile—it doesn’t touch his eyes. It’s smile-adjacent. It shares a zip code with a smile, maybe goes to the same school and shops at the same neighborhood grocery store, but it is decidedly not a smile.

It doesn’t feel like I’m moving “onward and upward,” like our valedictorian talked about at graduation. It feels like nothing is changing.

I have a theory that the pricier the wedding, the likelier the marriage is to fail.

I hate myself while I’m doing it, but I don’t hate the way he fists a hand in my hair.

The firelight hangs on to the angles of his face. The curve of his brow. The cut of his jaw. Everyone must realize how lovely their friends look in the light of a firepit on a beach at midnight. It’s one of the hallmarks of friendship, I’m pretty sure.

We were in the parking lot of a Denny’s that closed a couple years ago, and if there’s anything less sexy than a Denny’s, it’s an abandoned Denny’s. And what happened in the back seat was not a Grand Slam.

“We can’t keep meeting like this.”

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

“There are some things I agree with and some I don’t, but I still consider myself a Muslim.

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 divorce isn’t actually failure.”