Forever, Interrupted

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

wanted to reach across the table and wring his neck. My face flushed with jealousy. My chest felt like my lungs were a bonfire. I didn’t have a good reason. I couldn’t rationalize it. I wanted to yell at him and tell him what he had done wrong, but he hadn’t done anything wrong. Nothing at all. It didn’t even make sense for me to be this jealous. I just… I wanted to believe that Ben was mine. I wanted to believe that no one had made him smile until I did, no woman had made him yearn to touch her until I had. Suddenly, the woman calling took on a personality of her own in my head. I saw her in a red dress with long black hair. She probably wore black lace bra and panty sets. They probably always matched. In my head, her stomach was flat. In my head, she liked to be on top. Instead of admitting my jealousy, instead of telling the truth, I scoured the facts and tried to find a way to blame him.

I was starting to feel pretty stupid for walking out. I was starting to feel like the stupidity of my walking out had eclipsed his insensitivity.

Jealousy was so ugly. It made me feel so ugly.

But it was the moment I knew Ben loved me. I could feel it. I could feel that he loved me in a raw and real way, when it’s not all rainbows and butterflies, when sometimes it’s fear. I could feel his fear in that kiss and I could feel the desperation in his relief. It was intoxicating and it made me feel just a little less alone. The way we felt about each other, it made him do stupid things too.

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.

In the mornings, I ache for my dreams to be real, but it’s a familiar ache, and while it feels like it might kill me, I know from having felt it the day before that it won’t. And maybe that’s how some of my strength comes back.

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.” “Well,

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

But attachment and love are two different things.

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.

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.