The Ex Talk

by Rachel Lynn Solomon

Every time I imagined adulthood, it looked different from this reality. All the important people in my life have their person. I have an empty house and my supposed dream job that doesn’t always love me back.

I’m trapped between the pain of remembering and the fear of forgetting.

Hoping it would help me feel something again when all it did was make me feel worse.

I like you too much to keep pretending I don’t. I like you too much not to get attached because I’m already far more attached than I ever thought I’d be, and anything else is going to kill me.

The thing about losing someone is that it doesn’t happen just once. It happens every time you do something great you wish they could see, every time you’re stuck and you need advice. Every time you fail. It erodes your sense of normal, and what grows back is decidedly not normal, and yet you still have to figure out how to trudge forward.

But maybe that’s what we all are—halfway-broken people searching for things that will smooth our jagged edges.