Forever, Interrupted

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

This apartment is acting like nothing has changed. Everything has changed.

So maybe we’re all in the same boat. Maybe all women feel like “before” photos.

I would have loved this bar last week, when I liked things cool and clean. Now I hate it for being false and inauthentic.

I finally get up around noon, not because I feel ready to face the day but because I can no longer face the night.

What’s the point of a promise anyway? How can we expect people to stick to their word about anything when the world around us is so arbitrary, unreliable, and senseless?

I like things that have a right and a wrong answer, things that can be done perfectly. They don’t often come up in the humanities. They are normally relegated to the sciences. So I’ve always liked the alphabet and the Dewey decimal system for being objective standards in a subjective world.

“We love you,” he says, and I say, “I love you too,” out of social convention rather than feeling.

I based my career on the idea that words on pages bound and packaged help people. That they make people grow, they show people lives they’ve never seen. They teach people about themselves, and here I am, at my lowest point, rejecting help from the one place I always believed it would be.

I have not bounced back nicely. I’ve just learned to impersonate the living.

And she did this all on her own time, never mentioning it to me, as if it were a side project of self-development that she didn’t want to reveal until it was complete.

It’s empowering to be the one holding someone else up. It makes you feel strong, maybe even stronger than you are.

That is what true love is. True love is saying to someone “Forget about us. We will be okay,” when it might not even be true, when the last thing you want is to be forgotten.

We have to find little ways to smile. 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.