The Roughest Draft

by Emily Wibberley

Reading and loving books are the fingerprints of who I am—no matter how much I change, they’ll stay the same,

Today isn’t your entire life. Today is one day of your job. Do your job the best you can, then do the next thing. Okay?

I wonder if being cheated on feels like being given license to cheat.

“Forever is about reaching into the future, into years far away and unknowable. ‘Always’ is about every second of every day. It’s as far-reaching as ‘forever,’ it just starts sooner.”

I was trying so hard to want only the things I thought were safe enough to have.

Fiction comes from truth. It is a wonderful, imaginative, flourishing thing grown from a seed of real feelings, real desires, real fears. No artist ever creates from nothing. We work from what we’ve experienced, inspired by the unique piece of the world we see. It’s why art cannot be replicated.

Never leaving someone isn’t the same as loving them.

There’s no final page in life, no point where we kiss and everything is happily-ever-after. We can’t be contained in neat phrases or nicely designed covers. We’re not characters. We’re people. I couldn’t be with someone who only wanted the story version. I wanted—I want—something real,

Fiction is fiction and it’s real. They’re not opposites. They live within each other.”

“I love you, too,” I reply. I meet her eyes. There’s nothing original in the declaration, nothing perfectly crafted, no elegant metaphors, no profound prose. It’s a sentence every writer has used, one every person has spoken. It’s ordinary, common. And it’s perfect. The sentence captures what I couldn’t in hundreds of my finest pages. I wouldn’t change a word.

Because in the end, the best part of a love story isn’t having it. It’s getting to keep writing.