The Twelve Days of Dash and Lily

by Rachel Cohn

It’s always the ones who believe who are hurt the most when things go wrong.

“I don’t think it’s a matter of ready – I mean, not in an all-the-way sense. You’re never completely ready – you just get to the point where you’re ready enough. With us, we didn’t decide to move in together – we just slept over at one another’s places enough that we’d practically moved in together, and then realized it would be much more practical to actually do it.”

“Of course I love him. And I might even love him enough to stop being so afraid of it. That’s what we have to find out. And this is the way to find out – to wake up each morning and start each day together, to be the continuity for each other even when everything else is discontinuous or fickle or cruel. I know in my heart that I can live without him and I know in my heart that I don’t want to – that’s a good place to start, right?”

The people you know the most, the people you love the most – you’re also going to feel the parts of them you don’t know the most.

But there are times when he will fall into this deep incomprehensibility, when he will like something or need something or not need something that I can’t believe he’d like or need or not need, and I will be frightened that I have gotten every single thing about him wrong, including us.”

“I remind myself that I don’t need to know everything, that there will always be essential rooms within us that will be unknown. I loosen my idea of him, and he becomes recognizable again.”

The only problem with taking something back? It’s still inside there somewhere.

think that reality has the distinct potential to completely suck, and the way to get around that is to step out of reality from time to time and find something a little more enjoyable with someone you completely, unadulteratedly enjoy.

“When did you know you loved me?” I asked Dash. He said, “There wasn’t an actual moment. Don’t look so disappointed. It was more a gradual realization. A knowing of how much sweeter my life was for having you in it.

You can go anywhere in a book. Books are adventure. Knowledge. Possibility. Magic.”

The minute she left the apartment, I missed having her there. But as with all loves, I supposed, the consolation was in the fact that she’d be back.

“Why aren’t you crying, too?” I asked her between sniffles. “Because this is only going to get worse,” she said. “So we must buck up, put on a kind face, and get on with it.” “Get on with what?” “Life. In all its bittersweet glory.”

A party, like the human body, will fall into rigor mortis without proper circulation.”

You can’t stop time. You can’t make everyone healthy or always in love. You can’t. But you and me – what we have – that’s one thing we do have control over. That’s the one thing that’s up to us. There are times when it feels to me like it’s all up to you. And I’m sure there are times for you when it feels like it’s all up to me. But we have to move forward like it’s up to us, together. I know it’s not as intense or immediate as it used to be – but that just means that instead of having only a present together, we’re having a past, present, and future all at once.” Lily softened then. I could see it. She wasn’t giving up.