The Devil Wears Black

by L.J. Shen

Layla, my childhood friend turned next-door neighbor, called him a real-life Gaston. “Easy on the eyes but begging to get thrown from a roof.”

Haha!

“Poor me.” Sven swatted my hand away. “I was so busy trying to be the man I thought my parents wanted I completely missed out on my ho years. Don’t let that happen to you, Maddie. You go and be that ho we all want to be.”

Haha!

“Death is no longer an obscure idea. It is real and it is waiting, so you grab life by the balls. When you go through the horror of seeing someone you love die and still manage to wake up the next day to tie your shoelaces, to shove a tasteless breakfast down your throat, to breathe, you realize survival trumps tragedy. Always. It’s a primal instinct.”

“If you care about me,” she said slowly through a ragged breath, “then you will stop pursuing me. Let me live my life. Let me get over you. You confuse and infuriate and delight me. You make me feel all those emotions that I have no business feeling, and I’m desperate to move on. I want to want Ethan. Let one of us find their happiness. Because it is so painfully clear you don’t want to ever find yours.”

The grass is always greener through someone else’s Instagram filter. No one has their shit together. Fully, anyway. We’re all just pretending we know what we’re doing. Those of us who do it with a smile on our face just look like we’re enjoying it more.”

I’m doing this for me. Being good makes me sleep better at night. It’s not that I don’t suffer from the same symptoms as you—jealousy, heartache, insecurity. They’re the side effects of being alive, pretty much. But I learned a simple thing recently. That gap between reality and our dreams? That’s where life is tucked.”

Life is shorter than you think. And when you’re in my position, bedridden, a breath away from death, you don’t think about all the money you made, all the lucrative deals you signed, about the revenues and people who screwed you over and people you screwed over in business. You think about how lucky you are to be eating homemade banana bread and listening to your grandchild laughing from the other room and the love of your life being the person who made her laugh.”