I Thought You Said This Would Work

by Ann Garvin

Charismatic, sensitive, mean Jeff, who knew I wasn’t going anywhere, because you couldn’t leave your marriage with a baby without the kind of agency your parents should have taught you.

“I’ll text you,” she’d said, like she hadn’t packed my heart in her suitcase and was going to be driving down the road with it.

“We’re odd, we humans,” she would say. “We know people die, but we act astonished when it happens.

What is astonishing about death is our certainty that it isn’t going to happen to us or anyone we know without some kind of warning. And, we live our life doing stupid things like gossiping, when we should spend all our days planting flowers.”

When you were a child and you were taught to avoid fighting at all costs, you never got to see the rewards of having the hard conversation.

I couldn’t help it. When I meet people who exude warmth, I perk up. I’m like a daisy in need: when the sun shines, I bloom.

If you were interested in someone romantically after years of wandering in a love desert, the Friend Zone is not the zone you wanted to be in.

“You’re going to have to push away from the edge of the swimming pool and get into the deep end. If you don’t, you’ll always be hanging on with your fingertips, afraid.”

“Tom is still super pissed at Katie—you know, for whatever reason men are pissed at the women they divorce after they’ve been caught in an affair.”

“Safety and the idea that you can keep anyone safe is an illusion. But, loving someone is the ultimate safekeeping.”

This was the comfort of love. It didn’t cure cancer or reduce the pain of childbirth, but it cloaked lovers, friends, and family in an embrace that stretched far and wide and was supremely difficult to break, despite our best idiotic efforts.