Forever, Interrupted

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Every morning when I wake up I forget for a fraction of a second that you are gone and I reach for you. All I ever find is the cold side of the bed. My eyes settle on the picture of us in Paris, on the bedside table, and I am overjoyed that even though the time was brief I loved you and you loved me. —CRAIGSLIST POSTING, CHICAGO, 2009

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.

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 have always lived by the rule that your clothes can be a mess but if your face looks good, no one will notice. I probably believe this because I’d like to lose ten pounds but I think my face is cute. Girls that work out all day and have huge boobs but boring faces probably think the face doesn’t matter if your boobs are taken care of.

As I approach her door, my palms start to sweat. I’m not sure how to convince Susan of this, how I plan on defending Ben’s wishes to his own mother. It occurs to me that I just want her to like me.

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.

Life can’t go on. That’s just a thing people say to other people because they heard it on daytime TV. It doesn’t exist for me. It never will. There will be no moving on. But people not living in the valley of a tragedy don’t like to hear this. They like to hear you “buck up.” They want to say to your friends, to your co-workers, to the people you used to ride elevators with, that you’re “handling it well.” That you’re a “trooper.” The more crass of them want to say you’re a “tough bitch” or a “hard as nails motherfucker.” I’m not, but let them think it. It’s easier on all of us.

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.

For the first time, I don’t see myself. I see the woman they all see, the woman Susan sees: the fool who thought she was going to spend her life with Ben Ross.

I am lying to them. I have not bounced back nicely. I’ve just learned to impersonate the living. I have lost almost ten pounds. It’s that dreaded last ten that magazines say every woman wants to lose.

I hope you can understand that I was grieving. The pain in front of me felt so insurmountable, and to learn that my only child didn’t feel comfortable telling me about you… I couldn’t face that too. Not at that time. I told myself you were crazy, or lying, or… I blamed you. You were right when you said I hated you because you were the only one around to hate.

Like it or not, you are the truth about Ben. He loved you fiercely. And just because he didn’t tell me, doesn’t mean he didn’t love you. I just have to keep telling myself that.

We sit there for a minute, considering each other. Can we do this? Can we be good to each other? Susan seems convinced that we can, and she’s determined to take the lead.

We were or are, technically, family. What happens to the relationship you never had with your mother-in-law when your husband dies?

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.

I’m just trying to tell you that your life will be very long with zigzags you can’t imagine. You won’t realize just how young you are until you aren’t that young anymore.

I mean, everyone wants to love someone, right? I think I just mean, I finally feel ready to be with one person. And of all the people I’ve dated in the past, I think the problem was that I wasn’t into them. I was just into how much they were into me.

I think having you as a part of my life, helping you to deal with this, I think it’s helping me to avoid dealing with it. I think I thought that if I could help you to get to a place where you could live again, that I would be able to live again.

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.

You are everything I have ever wanted in another person. You are my best friend, my lover, my partner. And I promise that I will spend the rest of my life taking care of you, the way you deserve to be taken care of. My whole life I was never looking for something bigger than myself, and then I met you and I want to dedicate every day of my life to you. You are it for me. You are why I am here. Without you, I am nothing.

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. And when it does, the only thing you can do is hold on.