Forever, Interrupted

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

I really didn’t think this was going to happen. I thought bad things only happened to people with hubris. They don’t happen to people like me, people that know how fragile life is, people that respect the authority of a higher power. But it has. It has happened to me.

I look at my face and I think that I had someone who loved this face. And now he’s gone. And now no one loves my face anymore.

That’s how I could tell we both knew he would insist on paying for dinner. I wasn’t going to order anything extravagant on his dime, and if he’d really thought I might succeed in paying for this, he wouldn’t have ordered anything extravagant on mine.

Her candid voice, free from emotion, turmoil, and pain, is starting to piss me off. Her composure feels like spit in my face.

When you love someone so much that you’ve stuck around through all the interesting things that have happened to them and you have nothing left to say, when you know the course of their day before they even tell you, when you lie next to them and hold their hand even though they haven’t said one interesting thing in days, that’s a love I want. It’s the love I was on target for.

Propriety says not to discuss such intense matters in public, but whom does that serve?

Things happen in your life that you can’t possibly imagine. But time goes on and time changes you and the times change and the next thing you know, you’re smack in the middle of a life you never saw coming.”

I am done with my sandwich and he has barely started his. I am usually the one done last, but I now realize that’s because I am rarely the one listening.

I contemplate his words, remaining convinced that living any part of the years I have before me would be a betrayal to the years behind me.

he looks like he neither works out nor is a slovenly couch potato.

It's me lol

I did only know Ben for six months. I didn’t even celebrate a birthday with him. I only spent January to June with him. How well can you really love someone if you haven’t seen him through an August or an autumn? This is what I was afraid of. I was afraid that because I hadn’t known Ben long, I hadn’t known him well.

Why must everything be a life lesson? Why can’t I just act like I’m married and everyone leave me the hell alone?

“Listen to me; it means nothing. You think that some ten minutes you spent with Ben in a room defines what you meant to each other? It doesn’t. You define that. What you feel defines that. You loved him. He loved you. You believed in each other. That is what you lost. It doesn’t matter whether it’s labeled a husband or a boyfriend. You lost the person you love. You lost the future you thought you had.”

Love is love is love. When you lose it, it feels like the shittiest disaster in the world. Just like dog shit.”

“Sweetheart, I’m telling you, you love someone like that, you love them the right way, and no time would be enough. Doesn’t matter if you had thirty years,” she tells me. “It wouldn’t be enough.”

But you, you have to meet someone else in this life. I can’t imagine how much of a betrayal that would feel to me if I had to do it.” “It is a betrayal. All of it feels like betrayal.

Those nine days, those six months, they are a part of your life now, a part of you. They may not have been enough for you but they were enough to change you.

I want so badly to take all of her words and fit them like the pieces of a puzzle into the hole in my heart. I want to write those words down on little pieces of paper and swallow them, consume them, make them a part of me. Maybe then I could believe them.

They shine brighter than anything else in the sky and then fade out really quickly. A supernova is a short burst of extraordinary energy.”

No matter how strong you are, no matter how smart you are or tough you can be, the world will find a way to break you. And when it does, the only thing you can do is hold on.