Same Time Next Summer

by Annabel Monaghan

Putting a person back together isn’t easy, but if you’re smart about it you can reassemble yourself in a totally different, better way.

Gracie’s unfiltered joy should come in pill form.

“So, I hear you’re getting married out here,” he says. “Maybe,” I say. “Or in Connecticut. We haven’t decided. Jack and I. My fiancé. Jack.” Oh my God, stop. “He’s a lucky guy,” he says, which gives me pause. Wyatt was a lucky guy. Wyatt left me. How lucky could he possibly think Jack is?

Everything she loved to do came without force.

“We need to slow down,” she said by the time they were lying on the damp leaves. “Do we?” He was not slowing down. “We have all summer.” I want forever, he thought.

“If you’ve loved someone your whole life, it kind of makes sense that you’d love them forever.”

My mother is so happy and complete in the world she’s created.

Sam went into her room and cried until she’d completely exhausted herself. She longed for crying yourself to sleep to be a real thing. Sleep would have been a break. But she felt like she was on high alert, abandoned in this weird space with a heart full of terrifying feelings.

You are addicted to the dopamine reaction you feel when you get a hit of him. This is typical of a user who became hooked on a substance during a critical time of development, and now that addiction is woven into your nervous system. You’re well into your detox, and I am recommending no contact, which should be easy.”

“You’re eighteen years old. You’re not in love with this boy. It’s youth and sex and excitement, all mixed up into an obsession. Technically, I’d call this an adjustment disorder. We have to get you adjusted to life without him and focused on something else.”

to do that to your life.”

“I’m fine, just disoriented from the water. Or reoriented. I don’t know.”

Wyatt’s worked really hard to make his dream happen, and I’ve worked really hard to create a life that requires I try nothing.

Me:

“You’re the cake that looks normal until people dig in and find out it’s spectacular. You’re the chocolate fucking cake, Sam, and you won’t even choose it.”

“You’re the most important person that’s ever been in my life, and you’re not even the most important person in your own.”

If Jack doesn’t have a complete picture of who I am, that’s my own fault.

“Sometimes you have to walk away from all the things you don’t want to make room for the future. Blank canvas.”

I have a strong urge to protect her, to shuttle her through these years quickly so she can be thirty. Or, better, forty. But that’s not how caterpillars get there. It’s not how any of us do.