Breathless

by Jennifer Niven

Back in my room, I open one of the notebooks that hold my novel. I flip through, reading random passages and pages. Some of it’s good and some of it’s bad, and most of it is somewhere in between, but it all seems overwrought and overwritten, and none of it rings true. Mostly it just feels long ago, as if it was written by another person in another lifetime. Someone who thought she knew about life and love and clearly didn’t.

Life is an accumulation of aches. They fill you up and take your breath away and you think you’ll never breathe again, but before you know it, you are just words on paper, gone quiet and asleep until someone finds those words and reads them.

But we can only pay attention, hope we learn something, try not to fuck up again—at least not in the same exact way—and keep going forward, knowing that we’re absolutely going to fuck up. A lot.”

Yeah, you can put yourself on twenty-four-hour watch, never take your eyes off it, but that’s not going to keep bad things from happening. Because life is going to do what life’s going to do. The thing you can count on is that at some point something bad will happen.