By Any Other Name

by Lauren Kate

“Promise to find someone you really, really love.”

My mother liked overachievers. And she seemed to be asking, with her final words, for me to overachieve in love. But how? When your mom dies and you are young, the worst part is that you know there’s all this stuff you’ll need to know, and now who’s going to teach you?

At the very end, number ninety-nine, I wrote, Doesn’t die.

That’s the thing about romance. Its prospect can make even the most curmudgeonly blush.

“If I could solve the mystery for you, I would,” she said, patting my cheek, “but then, what the hell would the fun of life be?”

“What I love about love stories is their bravery,”

The routines we’ve fallen into sometimes make me feel restless and claustrophobic, like a windup toy stuck in a corner.

“Do you ever worry that we act like old married people who are neither old nor married?” I ask.

“Life’s greatest mystery is whether we shall die bravely.”

Noa Callaway has an Adam’s apple. Noa Callaway has chest hair. Noa Callaway has a deep voice and a firm handshake. By all estimation, Noa Callaway has other firm things, too.

‘The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.’ ”

“Roland Barthes did not toil in relative obscurity,” I say, “just to give some spoiled millionaire permission to be a prick.”

“Maybe you should ask yourself why my gender is so disturbing to you,” he shouts. “Isn’t it aggressively heteronormative to assume I have to be a woman?”

And then, I wonder— If I hadn’t taken that book so seriously, if I hadn’t committed my own list to paper, carried it around with me all these years . . . would I have fallen so hard and fast for Ryan when we met? Would I be as sure that he’s the one?

“All I’m suggesting is,” she says, “there’s a reason he’s been hiding behind a pseudonym.”

“That no one person can fulfill every single one of another person’s needs. Which is why book clubs and grandmothers exist.

some people can look into the abyss without losing sight of themselves or what they love. Without being too scared about what lies on the other side.

may be a mess, but my apartment doesn’t have to be.

Noah is going to be looking at this shelf and forming opinions about it, about me. We’re book people. It’s what we do.

There’s nothing that makes me feel more a part of my city than being holed up at a bar filled with interesting people having sparkling conversations.

We’ve become masters at changing the subject, lightening the mood. Pretending certain realities don’t loom in our near future.

“I’m tired of this idea that everything has to change—that we have to change—after we get married. It’s a wedding, not an apocalypse. Isn’t the point to celebrate what we already have?”

“I just want to be me. I want you to be you. Complete with all our eccentricities. I want us to write poetry to each other, even if it’s bad.”

“I know that you love me. And I love you. But I don’t think we love what our future looks like together.

For much of my life, I’ve wanted to be a Noa Callaway heroine; I’ve wanted to fall in love with a Noa Callaway hero. I thought I had found him in Ryan. And now, the only thing I know for sure is I was wrong.

Just because I can write love stories, doesn’t mean I can live them.”

But the more I thought about it, I realized that expectations are rarely rooted in reality, and maybe all the monk was talking about was acceptance. Maybe relationships truly begin with acceptance of who the other is.