Hello Stranger

by Katherine Center

Maybe life was full of surprises. Maybe disappointments could turn out to be blessings. Maybe tonight would end up being fun, after all.

he was my hero.

That’s the dark underbelly of hope that nobody ever talks about. How it can skew your perspective. How it can keep you in long past when any reasonable person would’ve been out.

Sometimes when I’m watching a movie and there’s a simple Big Misunderstanding between two people—he thinks she’s a space alien or something—I want to shout, “Just talk to each other!” But of course nothing in real life is ever simple like that.

“It’s like an M.C. Escher drawing.”

I could see him breathing deep, and then I realized I was, too. We’d had the story all wrong. And it might take some time to put it right. One thing was clear: He was here right now, and so was I.

“You can’t see when you’re not looking, I guess.” Then he tightened his hold on my gaze. “Anyway. You’re the one who was everywhere.”

We’re all so limited and disappointing and so, so wrong. Much of the time. Maybe even most of the time. We’re all so steeped in our own confirmation bias. We’re all so busy seeing what we expect to see. But we have our moments, too.

And the fuel for those emotional engines is anticipation. We piece the clues together and predict what’s going to happen, and we feel emotions—sometimes very strong ones—about what we’re predicting.

But guess what kind of anticipation romance novels use? Positively valenced. Romance novels, rom-coms, nontragic love stories—they all run on a blissful sense that we’re moving toward something better. Percentage-wise, the majority of clues writers drop in romance novels don’t give you things to dread. They give you things to look forward to.

We all sense it deep down, I suspect—past the snark and the tough-guy exteriors. Love is healing. It’s nourishing. It’s unapologetically optimistic. It’s the thing that leads us back to the light.

I know for sure is that reading love stories is good for you. That believing in love is believing in hope. And doing that—choosing in this cynical world to be a person who does that—really is doing something that matters.