I Could Live Here Forever

by Hanna Halperin

But he didn’t read books or think in the same way I did. Not that I needed to be with someone exactly like me, but sometimes I would tell Robbie something about my day or a thing that I noticed, and he would just nod or shrug without asking a question or adding to the conversation. We talked. We talked all the time. But I wanted him to say something that surprised me. Or look me deep in the eye and ask: Why? And really want to know.

“That has to do with me living my own life. It’s important that I still live my own life, right?”

“One day you’re going to look back on this and you’re going to laugh. I know it doesn’t feel that way now. But you’re going to be okay. You’re going to keep writing. And this is going to work out for you. I know it. I don’t know most things, but I know this.”

The story had taken on a life of its own, and that had been the most exciting part of all—when I found myself moving in places I never could have imagined.

I had surrendered to the relationship. The good parts and the bad. I stopped trying to change him at all—though now I was constantly trying to figure him out.

“And then I started accepting that nothing is really in my control. I think things happen the way they’re supposed to.

I learned after a while, though, that there’s a lot of bad people out there. It didn’t make me less loving, but it made me pickier. At the end of the day, you have to decide what you want to accept in a relationship.”