Beach Read

When I watch you sleep," he said shakily, "I feel overwhelmed that you exist.

I’ve never met someone who is so perfectly my favorite person.

And that was the moment I realized: when the world felt dark and scary, love could whisk you off to go dancing; laughter could take some of the pain away; beauty could punch holes in your fear. I decided then that my life would be full of all three.

He fit so perfectly in the love story I'd imagined for myself that I mistook him for the love of my life.

That was what I'd always loved about reading, what had driven me to write in the first place. That feeling that a new world was being spun like a spiderweb around you and you couldn't move until the whole thing had revealed itself to you.

If you think the story has a sad ending, it's because it's not over yet.

When you love someone,” he said haltingly, “. . . you want to make this world look different for them. To give all the ugly stuff meaning, and amplify the good. That’s what you do. For your readers. For me. You make beautiful things, because you love the world, and maybe the world doesn’t always look how it does in your books, but . . . I think putting them out there, that changes the world a little bit. And the world can’t afford to lose that.

That’s the key to marriage. You have to keep falling in love with every new version of each other, and it’s the best feeling in the whole world.

Sometimes life is very hard. Sometimes it demands so much of you that you start losing pieces of yourself as you stretch out to give what the world wants to take.

Falling's the part that takes your breath away. It's the part when you can't believe the person standing in front of you both exists and happened to wander into your path. It's supposed to make you feel lucky to be alive, exactly when and where you are.

Again and again he told me I wasn't myself. But he was wrong. I was the same me I'd always been. I'd just stopped trying to glow in the dark for him, or anyone else.

People were complicated. They weren't math problems; they were collections of feelings and decisions and dumb luck.

If you swapped out all my Jessicas for Johns, do you know what you'd get? Fiction. Just fiction. Ready and willing to be read by anyone, but somehow by being a woman who writes about women, I've eliminated half the Earth's population from my potential readers, and you know what? I don't feel ashamed of that. I feel pissed.

Bad things don't dig down through your life until the pit's so deep that nothing good will ever be big enough to make you happy again. No matter how much shit, there will always be wildflowers.

You know that feeling, when you're watching someone sleep and you feel overwhelmed with joy that they exist?

Happy. Not giddy or overjoyed, but that low, steady level of happiness that, in the best periods of life, rides underneath everything else, a buffer between you and the world you are walking over.

I always like that thought, the way two people really did seem to grow into one. Or at least two overlapping parts, trees with tangled roots.

For January, I don't care how the story ends as long as I spend it with you.

Love, after all, was often made not of shiny things but practical ones. Ones that grew old and rusted only to be repaired and polished.

That is how life feels too often. Like you're doing everything you can to survive only to be sabotaged by something beyond your control, maybe even some darker part of yourself.

Here's the thing about writing Happily Ever Afters: it helps if you believe in them.

When I think about you, January, and I think about doing laundry with you and trying terrible green juice cleanses and going to antiques malls with you, I only feel happy. The world looks different than I ever thought it could be, and I don’t want to look for what’s broken or what could go wrong. I don’t want to brace myself for the worst and miss out on being with you.

I thought - think it's brave to believe in love. I mean, the lasting kind. To try for that, even knowing it can hurt you.

Dammit, R.E.M. was right: Every single person on the planet had to take turns hurting. Sometimes all you could do was hold on to each other right until the dark spat you back out.

Hate, I found out on the ride home, was a less embarrassing way to say fear.

I want to be the one who gives you what you deserve, and I want to sleep next to you every night and to be the one you complain about book stuff to, and I don’t think I ever could deserve any of that, and I know this thing between us isn’t a sure thing, but that’s what I want to aim for with you. Because I know no matter how long I get to love you, it will be worth whatever comes after.

I know feeling small gets to some people, . . . but I kind of like it. Takes the pressure off when you’re just one life of six billion at any given moment. And when you’re going through something hard . . . it’s nice to know you’re not even close to the only one.

It's not about what's happened. It's about how you cope with things, who you are. You've always been this fierce fucking light, and even when you're at your worst, when you feel angry and broken, you still know how to be a person. How to tell people you- you love them.

The only promise you ever had in life was the one moment you were living.

I did what any reasonable adult woman would do when confronted with her college rival turned next-door neighbor. I dove behind the nearest bookshelf.