Beach Read

by Emily Henry

“It’s always harder to write when you have to. It’s like . . . the pressure turns it into a job, like anything else, and you might as well be selling insurance. The story suddenly loses any urgency to be told.”

I’d done everything I could to prove that I was okay, that I wasn’t worrying. I did everything I could for that story. The one where the three of us were unbreakable. On the drive home from the funeral, I didn’t want to be okay anymore.

That feeling that a new world was being spun like a spiderweb around you and you couldn’t move until the whole thing had revealed itself to you.

Jacques didn’t know what to do with this version of me, who stayed in bed and couldn’t write or read without coming apart, who slugged around at home letting laundry pile up and ugliness seep into our dreamy apartment,

He fit so perfectly into the love story I’d imagined for myself that I mistook him for the love of my life.

He was a realist who was a little too afraid of hope to see things clearly when it came to his own life. But he was also exceptionally good at sitting with people through their shit, making them feel less alone

Happy. Not giddy or overjoyed, but that low, steady level of happiness that, in the best periods of life, rides underneath everything else, a buffer between you and the world you are walking over.

The one who didn’t feel so weighted down by the world around him that he had to lean just to stay upright.

But other times, we can’t move forward because there are hard questions we have to ask first. Hurdles in our path we first have to jump or walls that need breaking down—interrogations demanding to be made.