Book Lovers

by Emily Henry

Mom’s theory was that youthful skin would make a woman more money (true in both acting and waitressing), good underwear would make her more confident (so far, so true), and good books would make her happy (universal truth), and we’ve clearly both packed with this theory in mind.

Maybe this is why people take trips, for that feeling of your real life liquefying around you, like nothing you do will tug on any other strand of your carefully built world. It’s a feeling not unlike reading a really good book: all-consuming, worry-obliterating.

She’s frustrated with how much I work, and that’s creating distance. The distance has her keeping secrets. The secrets have me frustrated with her. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, keeping us locked in an invisible, unspoken argument, wherein we both pretend nothing’s wrong.

Hidden there, under my rigidly manufactured sense of control and my checklists and my steel exterior, there is always fear.

in a life where so many things have gone wrong, there can be beauty too. That there is always hope, no matter what.

Somehow, it never occurred to me that this was an option: that two people, in the same hug, could both be allowed to fall apart. That maybe it’s neither of our jobs to keep a steel spine. That we can both survive this pain without the other shouldering it.

sucks, and I can’t change that, but I’m here, with my sister, and somehow we’ll get through it. You can take the city person out of the city, but the city will always be in them. I think it’s the same for sisters. Anywhere we go, we won’t leave each other. We couldn’t even if we wanted to. And we don’t. We never will.

this wanting, it feels good, like a bruise you need to press on, a reminder that there are things in life so valuable that you must risk the pain of losing them for the joy of briefly having them.

Maybe love shouldn’t be built on a foundation of compromises, but maybe it can’t exist without them either. Not the kind that forces two people into shapes they don’t fit in, but the kind that loosens their grips, always leaves room to grow. Compromises that say, there will be a you-shaped space in my heart, and if your shape changes, I will adapt. No matter where we go, our love will stretch out to hold us, and that makes me feel like . . . like everything will be okay.

“For anyone who wants it all,” she begins, “may you find something that is more than enough.”