The Ex Talk

by Rachel Lynn Solomon

So often, I’m trapped between the pain of remembering and the fear of forgetting.

“If I kissed you again,” he says, stepping closer, an intensity in his gaze I’ve never seen before, “it wouldn’t be for the show, or for research, or for any reason other than that I wanted to.”

The thing about losing someone is that it doesn’t happen just once. It happens every time you do something great you wish they could see, every time you’re stuck and you need advice. Every time you fail. It erodes your sense of normal, and what grows back is decidedly not normal, and yet you still have to figure out how to trudge forward.

But maybe that’s what we all are—halfway-broken people searching for things that will smooth our jagged edges.