Beach Read

by Emily Henry

And that was the moment I realized: when the world felt dark and scary, love could whisk you off to go dancing; laughter could take some of the pain away; beauty could punch holes in your fear. I decided then that my life would be full of all three. Not just for my own benefit, but for Mom’s, and for everyone else around me.

I silently prayed the man was asleep—that I wouldn’t have to spend an entire summer next door to someone who’d heard me shout good old-fashioned foot job.

And I hid the complicated feelings that came with trying to memorize someone you loved, just in case.

Look! I’m fine! Look! I have every beautiful thing you wanted for me! Look! This hasn’t affected me at all!

This was a thought when she was trying to prove her her parents and her family that she was okay when she wasn’t and it’s just so relatable.

It didn’t take inspiration to dredge up a list of plot points, but to find that moment—the perfect moment that defined a book, that made it come alive as something greater than the sum of its words—that required an alchemy you couldn’t fake.

Again and again he told me I wasn’t myself. But he was wrong. I was the same me I’d always been. I’d just stopped trying to glow in the dark for him, or anyone else.

I wanted to know whether you could ever fully know someone. If knowing how they were—how they moved and spoke and the faces they made and the things they tried not to look at—amounted to knowing them. Or if knowing things about them—where they’d been born, all the people they’d been, who they’d loved, the worlds they’d come from—added up to anything.

“Your mother has been a lot of people in the twenty years I’ve known her, and I’ve had a chance to fall in love with every single one of them, Janie. That’s the key to marriage. You have to keep falling in love with every new version of each other, and it’s the best feeling in the whole world.”

Every single person on the planet had to take turns hurting. Sometimes all you could do was hold on to each other tight until the dark spat you back out.

“When you love someone,” he said haltingly, “. . . you want to make this world look different for them. To give all the ugly stuff meaning, and amplify the good.

You make beautiful things, because you love the world, and maybe the world doesn’t always look how it does in your books, but . . . I think putting them out there, that changes the world a little bit.

Bad things don’t dig down through your life until the pit’s so deep that nothing good will ever be big enough to make you happy again. No matter how much shit, there will always be wildflowers. There will always be Petes and Maggies and rainstorms in forests and sun on waves.”

Love, after all, was often made not of shiny things but practical ones. Ones that grew old and rusted only to be repaired and polished. Things that got lost and had to be replaced on a regular basis.

The beautiful lies were all gone. Destroyed. And I was still upright.

sometimes life is very hard. Sometimes it demands so much of you that you start losing pieces of yourself as you stretch out to give what the world wants to take.

Still other days I wonder if it’s all a big F-U to the universe. “If you want to destroy my life, I can destroy it worse.”