The Roughest Draft

by Emily Wibberley

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?

We might have some ugly furniture, but the house we’re building still feels like it could be home.

“Emotions need time to simmer,”

I’ve heard people compare fights to fire. It’s the wrong metaphor. Flames flourish with space, openness, room to breathe, kindling to feed them. Fights come from the opposite—from pressure, restraint, deprivation.

I never know which is worse, war or a stalemate.

Maybe to other people, finding a new novel to read isn’t necessarily an entire life, but to me, it’s something.

I promised myself I’d never be with someone when I wanted someone else.

I’m not unusual in what scares me. What frightens me frightens everyone. I’m scared of being nothing. Not becoming nothing, in the sense of dying. I mean the life-in-death of being no one special. Being nobody’s person. Being worth nothing.

It’s not just Kat herself I find irresistible—her laughter, her eyes, her body. It’s this. It’s the impulses so much simpler, so much more innocent, so much more fundamental. To feel her wounds with her. To be there for her. To help her through. Even now, I couldn’t fight it if I tried. My first thought is for her.

Being with her now is proof that you can think you’ve rebuilt, shored your walls, and yet still a person to whom you’ve given too much of yourself is a hurricane who can sweep in with a shared smile over a glass of wine in the early evening.

Some truths are so obvious they don’t need to be said out loud.

I learned sometimes relationships don’t die. They just don’t grow. Kept from sunlight, from nourishment, they never flourish. Nothing is different today from how Chris’s and my relationship has been for years. He was an easy presence in my life, someone who gave me the appearance of contentment. A walking résumé for a husband. He was successful, handsome, and smart. He was involved in my career—which wasn’t hard since he was my agent. Above all, I knew he would never leave me. I didn’t know then what I do now. Never leaving someone isn’t the same as loving them.

Oof

If his eyes were the ocean before, now they’re the midday sun sparking off the waves.

I want to write our lives together, K. To make each of my days a page written in your hand. To craft the chapters of my future with you in every word. Because I’ve realized a life lived with you is the best story I could ever tell.

Maybe the worst wounds don’t hurt until the shock wears off.

If we’re not doing this to be happier, then why, Evelyn? To find out who we are again, Evelyn says.

Of course, there’s no keeping your soul out of your prose entirely.

Maybe your coffee gets cold, maybe you don’t check your phone or your email for a while. Otherwise, the world continues to turn, while your personal, private story ends.

I love even our roughest draft. I love every fraught page we’ve rewritten to get to here. Because in the end, the best part of a love story isn’t having it. It’s getting to keep writing.