You and Me on Vacation

by Emily Henry

He’s fully reading a book at a bar.

“Hey, tiger.”

the number one thing you should not bring up is your codependent relationship with your asshole cat.”

“You approach everything with a wolfish gleam in your eye.”

I like how he always sits like this when we’re out together: his upper body facing the bar, his long legs facing me, like he’s keeping some secret door to himself open just for me.

“Poppy, it’s important to me that you know,” he says slowly, “that if I ever do manage to go on another date, it will have absolutely nothing to do with your so-called help.”

That crush of happiness, that feeling that this is what life’s about: being somewhere beautiful, with someone you love.

There is literally no one on earth better equipped to have a magical vacation than a travel journalist with a big-ass media conglomerate’s checkbook. If you can’t have an inspired trip, then how the hell do you expect the rest of the world to?”

Your style is, like, 1960s Parisian bread maker’s daughter bicycling through her village at dawn, shouting Bonjour, le monde whilst doling out baguettes.”

“I’m not happy.”

I’d feel like—like my blood was humming. Like the air was just vibrating with possibility around me. I don’t know. I’m not sure what’s changed. Maybe I have.”

“I thought the whole thing about millennials was that we don’t get what we want. The houses, the jobs, the financial freedom. We just go to school forever, then bartend ’til we die.” “Yeah,” she says, “but you dropped out of college and went after what you want. So here we are.”

“that purpose matters more than contentment.

ALEXANDER THE GREATEST. One word. Hey.

When you imagine a new best friend for yourself, you never name him Alex.

Now let’s get some juice. That cheese board has basically formed a cork in my butthole and everything’s just piling up behind it.”

“So you won’t mind if I put on Mariah Carey’s ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You’?” “It’s May,” he says. “I’ll consider my question answered,” I say. “That’s unfair,” he says. “What kind of a barbarian listens to Christmas music in May?”

“Oh my god,” I say. “You’re such an old man screaming at the sky.”

feet pounding against pavement and rattling your whole skeleton while your heart jackhammers in your chest and your lungs fight for breath?”

“What, and now we’re going for that early-2000s emo angle?” I say. “Find a happy medium.”

“How do you know how to use portrait mode? Did your grandson teach you that when he was home for Thanksgiving?”

“This car,” Alex says, “isn’t going to live long enough to see the end of the Star Wars franchise.” “But who among us will?” I say.

“You know,” he says, “your bullies have likely graduated by now.” “We really can’t be sure,” I say.

I was something of a loose part, that baffling extra bolt IKEA packs with your bookcase, just to make you sweat.

He saw me, and he loved me.

“If any of my juniors called you Porny Poppy, I’d fucking waste them.” “That

Note to self: no more shitting on Ohio.

“I tell you what. You can have my summer breaks. I’ll keep those wide open for you, and we’ll go anywhere you want, that we can afford.”

The love rises less like a wave and more like an instantaneously erected steel skyscraper, shooting up through my center and knocking everything else out of its way.

Spending time with my parents has been great, but everything else about being home makes me feel claustrophobic, like the suburbs are a net pulling tighter and tighter around me as I struggle against it.

I bet this would look beautiful on film.

First we walked the Golden Gate Bridge, which was amazing, but also colder than I’d expected and so windy we couldn’t hear each other.

We took a cab to City Lights first, a bookstore and publisher in one that had been around since the height of the beatnik era.

It was hard to choose a restaurant in a city with this much to offer,

“But you would love New York,” I say. “I mean, think about the bookstores.”

“I want to get married and have kids and grandkids and get really fucking old with my wife, and to live in our house for so long that it smells like us.

I shove down the hazy memories of everything that mouth did in Croatia.

“What I’m doing wrong is trying to find a meaningful connection on a dating app.” “Well, obviously,” I say. “But let’s see what else.”

NEW ORLEANS.

“You make me weird. I’m not like this with anyone else.”

I love you more now than I ever have.

I love that, being the one who doesn’t count. The one who’s allowed to see all of Alex. The one who makes him weird.

The story really is short. Nine pages, about a boy who was born with a pair of wings. All his life, people tell him that this means he should try to fly. He’s afraid to. When he finally does, jumps off a two-story roof, he falls. He breaks his legs and wings. He never gets them reset. As he recovers, the bone heals in its misshapen form. Finally, people stop telling him that he must’ve been born to fly. Finally, he’s happy.

When I was a kid, I used to have these panic attacks thinking about how I could never be anyone else. I couldn’t be my mom or my dad, and for my whole life, I’d have to walk around inside a body that kept me from ever truly knowing anyone else.

It made me feel lonely, desolate, almost hopeless.

“Who else do you think about being?” my dad said with his particular blunt fascination.

And now I’m crying because reading this story makes me feel for the first time that I’m not in my body. Like there’s some bubble that stretches around me and Alex and makes it so we’re just two different colored globs in a lava lamp, mixing freely, dancing around each other, unhindered.

I’m crying because I’m relieved. Because I will never again feel as alone as I did during those long nights as a kid. As long as I have him, I will never be alone again.

“You poor innocent baby creature, freshly arrived to earth,” I coo.

“So basically I should delete Tinder and throw my phone into the sea.”