The Dinner List

by Rebecca Serle

Worrying is wishing for what you don’t want.

It was like the universe had put us on opposite sides so we could walk together then, in that moment, with the sky turning from rage (red, orange) to surrender (blue, yellow) right around us.

dating Tobias felt like playing Jenga. How much can I say? If I reveal this, will the whole tower collapse?

Why sit around and think about you when I could see you?”

I’d keep that sweatshirt even after he left, because it still smelled like him.

I had to admit it was just a sweatshirt. He was gone.

Jessica has this theory that people in relationships are either flowers or gardeners. Two flowers shouldn’t partner; they need someone to support them, to help them grow.

Sex does that sometimes. It smooths time out. It makes you think it’s okay to be farther down the road, somewhere you’re not yet ready to be.

I didn’t want to break the spell with even a promise of what was to come.

Kindness before honesty.

But as the honesty grew, so did the cruelty. Sometimes I thought we were being honest just to see how deep we could cut.

“Sometimes I think that the only true way we can ever know a thing’s value is by losing it.”

“Happiness is not constantly needing things to be at their full potential,”

My happiness is accepting that ninety-five percent of the time my life is deeply imperfect.”

“The simple beauty, as you put it, is from things not always aligning. There is no simple beauty in perfection.”

it’s also not an easy thing to be married to darkness. Eventually I dimmed so far I extinguished.”

“Love is still the answer,” she says. “It’s the questions that stop mattering so much,”

But it was always there. The last, most important word. It’s fitting, then, that love was the last thing to go.

But as time went on I found that I wanted him to talk more. It was like he thought it was enough to know me for the both of us, but it wasn’t. I wanted to know what went on inside him, too.

Her delicate features sing out like stars,

the loneliness I’d feel from that particular interaction—her life so full, mine still so microscopic—all the same misfit details—would be enough to send me back to bed.

I was happy, and happiness has a way of quickening. Grief marks things. Joy lets them through.

Habits make of tomorrow, yesterday.

we could have the things we wanted, just not together.

I was ready for something else in the way you’re ready to move from middle school to high school. Not because it’s a personal choice, necessarily, but because it’s time.

“But sometimes it felt like we left too much up to fate.”

there was something romantic about being young and broke and in love.

I remember thinking that this was the heaven I wanted to be in—this, right here. The two of us and butter and the sunset—making everything fluid and hazy and golden.

He had, in a moment, decided our future was more important than our past. It was as simple as that.

We were the best when we were separate, uninterrupted.

Our problem wasn’t us together, it was us in the world—a world that demanded we reconcile its reality with our romance.

“You both started to be resentful of all the things you thought you’d given up for the other one, and that resentment took up all the space—it pushed everything good out.

the woven web of us, of all of us—of the people who aren’t here but should be—

The salt air was cold and the coffee was warm and the sand was wet.

this dinner, whatever it may not be, is a stroke of luck, of fate, of fortune—

“Forgiveness,”

“It’s more for the bestower than the bestowed.”

You’re not characters in a novel.

They are actually

I was coming to the end of my twenties,

I spent everything hoping one day, what? Something magical would happen?

“having a partner you can exist in the world with, not one who you need to tuck away with, makes life a lot easier.”

That’s the thing about life—these moments that define us emerge out of nothing. A missed call. A trip down the stairs. A car accident. They happen in a moment, a breath.

He wanted to make me happy, and I wanted him to be happy, and the two weren’t compatible.

knew the sadness would be too big, too wide—I didn’t want to feel it. The anger was shorter. Let me burn there.

I was scared of being without him, of course I was. But what terrified me more was him being without me—what he would find in that quiet. Whether it would be his happiness.

maybe it’s wrong to think you guys have to change for each other.”

Change is the only true constant.

We’re so close to the previous minute; how hard would it be to just turn back the clock? To just quickly undo what has just been done?

Somewhere deep in there, below the trappings of her life, is a woman who still believes in magic.