Daisy Jones & The Six

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

That’s how it was back then. I was just supposed to be the inspiration for some man’s great idea.

You have these lines you won’t cross. But then you cross them. And suddenly you possess the very dangerous information that you can break the rule and the world won’t instantly come to an end. You’ve taken a big, black, bold line and you’ve made it a little bit gray. And now every time you cross it again, it just gets grayer and grayer until one day you look around and you think, There was a line here once, I think.

I think you have to have faith in people before they earn it. Otherwise it’s not faith, right?

Karen: We were sort of quiet on the phone for a second. And then I said, “How come you’ve never made a move on me?” I could hear him drinking a beer. I could hear him take a sip. He said, “I don’t take shots I know I’ll miss.” It was out of my mouth before I’d decided to say it. I said, “I don’t think you’ll miss, Dunne.” And then as soon as I said it, there was a dial tone. Graham: I have never run anywhere faster than down that hall to her room.

And I always noticed that he used to squeeze the lime into her drink before he handed it to her whenever we were all out somewhere. He’d take his own lime and squeeze it into her glass, too. He’d squeeze the two wedges in and then throw them in with the ice. It seemed like a beautiful thing to have, somebody giving you their lime wedge. I mean, I hate lime, actually. But you get the point.

People say that life keeps moving, but they don’t mention that it does stop sometimes, just for you. Just for you and your girl. The world stops spinning and just lets you two lie there. Feels like it, anyway. Sometimes. If you’re lucky. Call me a romantic if you have to. Worse things to be.

I just remember champagne and cocaine. It was that kind of party. Those are the best parties. Champagne and coke and bikinis around the pool before we realized the drugs were killing us and the sex was coming for us, too.

I couldn’t stay. I couldn’t stay because when I looked at Daisy, wet and bleeding and out of it and half-near falling down, I did not think, Thank God I stopped using. I thought, She knows how to have fun.

The thing is, I’m a person who survives despite his instincts. My instincts said to run toward the chaos. And my better brain sent me home to my woman.

But the only reason people thought I had everything is because I had all the things you can see. I had none of the things you can’t.

History is what you did, not what you almost did, not what you thought about doing. And I was proud of what I did.

Songs are about how it felt, not the facts. Self-expression is about what it feels to live, not whether you had the right to claim any emotion at any time. Did I have a right to be mad at him? Did he do anything wrong? Who cares! Who cares? I hurt. So I wrote about it.

You can justify anything. If you’re narcissistic enough to believe that the universe conspires for and against you—which we all are, deep down—then you can convince yourself you’re getting signs about anything and everything.

It made for a great show. But it was my life

All I will say is that you show up for your friends on their hardest days. And you hold their hand through the roughest parts. Life is about who is holding your hand and, I think, whose hand you commit to holding.

But if you get to be my age and you can’t look back at your life and wonder about some of your choices … well, you have no imagination.