Reminders of Him

by Colleen Hoover

I want to be good at life. I want to make it look effortless, but up until this point, I’ve made every aspect of life appear entirely too difficult to navigate.

As soon as he gives his attention to someone at the other end of the bar, I take a drink of my coffee and close my eyes and cry because life can be so fucking cruel and hard, and I’ve wanted to quit living it so many times, but then moments like these remind me that happiness isn’t some permanent thing we’re all trying to achieve in life, it’s merely a thing that shows up every now and then, sometimes in tiny doses that are just substantial enough to keep us going.

People say you fall in love, but fall is such a sad word when you think about it. Falls are never good. You fall on the ground, you fall behind, you fall to your death. Whoever was the first person to say they fell in love must have already fallen out of it. Otherwise, they’d have called it something much better.

You won’t ever get over that. So, you decide right now, right here. Are you gonna live in your sadness or are you gonna die in it?”

And now we never will, because life is a cruel, cruel thing, the way it picks and chooses who to bully. We’re given these shitty circumstances and told by society that we, too, can live the American dream. But what they don’t tell us is that dreams almost never come true. It’s why they call it the American dream rather than the American reality.

How many losses can one person take before they just throw in the fucking towel,

It’s strange, being involved in every facet of another human being, and then suddenly not knowing anything.

Maybe if I acknowledge all the good things, no matter how small, they’ll add up to make the bad things in my life less painful.

It is what it is. A fucked-up situation, with no evil people to blame. We’re all just a bunch of sad people doing what we have to do to make it until tomorrow. Some of us sadder than others. Some of us more willing to forgive than others. Grudges are heavy, but for the people hurting the most, I suppose forgiveness is even heavier.

It was a stark realization that no matter how much you love someone, you can still do despicable things to them.

There was before you and there was during you. For some reason, I never thought there would be an after you. But there was, and I was in it. I’ll be in it forever.

proves that time, distance, and devastation allow people enough opportunity to craft villains out of people they don’t even know.