One True Loves

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

  I don’t know if there is a right and wrong way to grieve. I just know that losing you has gutted me in a way I honestly didn’t think was possible. I’ve felt pain I didn’t think was human.

  At times, it has made me lose my mind. (Let’s just say that I went a little crazy up on our roof.)

  At times, it has nearly broken me.

  And I’m happy to say that now is a time when your memory brings me so much joy that just thinking of you brings a smile to my face.

  I’m also happy to say that I’m stronger than I ever knew.

  I have found meaning in life that I never would have guessed.

  And now I’m surprising myself once again by realizing that I am ready to move forward.

  I once thought grief was chronic, that all you could do was appreciate the good days and take them along with the bad. And then I started to think that maybe the good days aren’t just days; maybe the good days can be good weeks, good months, good years.

  Now I wonder if grief isn’t something like a shell.

  You wear it for a long time and then one day you realize you’ve outgrown it.

  So you put it down.

  It doesn’t mean that I want to let go of the memories of you or the love I have for you. But it does mean that I want to let go of the sadness.

  I won’t ever forget you, Jesse. I don’t want to and I don’t think I’m capable of it.

  But I do think I can put the pain down. I think I can leave it on the ground and walk away, only coming back to visit every once in a while, no longer carrying it with me.

  Not only do I think I can do that, but I think I need to.

  I will carry you in my heart always, but I cannot carry your loss on my back anymore. If I do, I’ll never find any new joy for myself. I will crumble under the weight of your memory.

  I have to look forward, into a future where you cannot be. Instead of back, to a past filled with what we had.

  I have to let you go and I have to ask you to let me go.

  I truly believe that if I work hard, I can have the sort of life for myself that you always wanted for me. A happy life. A satisfied life. Where I am loved and I love in return.

  I need your permission to find room to love someone else.

  I’m so sorry that we never got the future we talked about. Our life together would have been grand.

  But I’m going out into the world with an open heart now. And I’m going to go wherever life takes me.

  I hope you know how beautiful and freeing it was to love you when you were here.

  You were the love of my life.

  Maybe it’s selfish to want more, maybe it’s greedy to want another love like that.

  But I can’t help it.

  I do.

  So I said yes to a date with Sam Kemper. I like to think you would like him for me, that you’d approve. But I also want you to know, in case it doesn’t go without saying, that no one could ever replace you. It’s just that I want more love in my life, Jesse.

  And I’m asking for your blessing to go find it.

  Love,

  Emma

  I know I’m adding new splotches, new tears, to the page. But I can’t seem to stop them from coming. When I finally look at Jesse, his eyes are watery. He puts his arm around me and pulls me in tight. The pain between us feels sharp enough to cut, heavy enough to sink us.

  “What did you do on the roof?” he says again, this time softer, kinder.

  I catch my breath and then I tell him.

  “Everyone said you were dead,” I start. “And I was convinced they were all wrong and that you were trying to come home to me. I just knew it. So one day, when I couldn’t take it anymore, I went up to the roof and saw this small sliver of ocean and I just . . . I became convinced that you were going to swim to shore. I got your binoculars and I . . . I stood there, watching the small little piece of shoreline, waiting for you to surface.”

  Jesse is looking right at me, listening to my every word.

  “Marie found me and told me you weren’t going to swim back to me. That you weren’t going to just appear on the beach like that. That you were dead. She said that I had to face it and start dealing with it. And so I did. But it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I wasn’t sure I’d make it through the day. Sometimes I was living hour by hour. I’ve never been more confused or felt less like myself.”

  Jesse pulls me in tighter, holding me. “Do you realize that we were both looking out at the same ocean looking for each other?” he says.

  I close my eyes and think of him waiting for me. I remember what it felt like to wait for him.

  “I had this idea in the car that I would look through that envelope and find all of the stuff in there, the memories and the pictures, and that I would show you how happy we were together. I thought I’d be able to make you see that you were wrong. That we are the same people we were when we loved each other. That we are meant to be together forever. But you know what I realized?”

  “What?” I say.

  “I hate your hair.”

  I pull back from him and he laughs. “I know that’s not very nice to say but it’s true. I was looking at those pictures of you back then with your gorgeous long hair, and I always loved how it wasn’t really blond, but it wasn’t really brown. I mean, I loved your hair. And now I’m back and you’ve chopped it off and it’s blond and, you know, maybe I’m supposed to like it, but I was sitting in the car thinking, ‘She’ll grow her hair out again.’ And then I thought, ‘Well, wait, she likes her hair like that.’ ”

  “Yes, I do!” I say, stung.

  “That’s exactly my point. This is you now. Short blond hair. My Emma had long, light brown hair. And that’s not you anymore. I can’t just look at you and ignore your hair. I have to look at you as who you are. Right now. Today.”

  “And you don’t like my hair,” I say.

  Jesse looks at me. “I’m sure it’s beautiful,” he says. “But, right now, all I can see is that it’s not like it used to be.”

  I find myself leaning back into him, putting my head back onto his chest. “The Emma I knew wanted to live in California, and she wanted to be as far away from her parents’ bookstore as possible. And she wasn’t going to sit still until she’d seen as much of the world as she could. She loved tiny hotel shampoo bottles and the smell of the airport. She didn’t know how to play a single note on a piano. And she loved me and only me,” he says. “But I guess that’s not you anymore.”

  I shake my head without looking at him.

  “And I have to stop pretending that it is. Especially because . . . I’m not the same, either. I know it seems like I don’t know that, but I do. I know I’ve changed. I’m know I’m . . .” I’m surprised to see that Jesse has begun to cry. I hold him tighter, listening, wishing I could take the pain away, spare him any more hardship on top of what he’s already faced. I want so badly to protect him from the world, to ensure nothing ever hurts him again. But I can’t, of course. No one can do that for anybody.

  “I’m messed up, Emma,” he continues. “I’m not OK, I don’t think. I keep acting as if I feel OK here, but . . . I don’t. I don’t feel like I belong anywhere. Not here, not there. I’m . . . struggling to keep it together almost every moment of the day. One minute I feel overwhelmed by how much food is around and then the next minute I can’t bring myself to eat any of it. The night I landed I woke up around three and went down to the kitchen and ate so much I made myself sick. The doctors say that I still need to be mindful of what I eat and how much, but I just want to eat nothing or everything. There’s no in-between. It’s not just food, either. When we were in the shower earlier, I was thinking, ‘We should get a bucket and save some of this water. Store it.’ ”

  He’s finally ready to say how he really feels and it’s all spilling out of him like a turned-over gallon of milk.

  “I can’t even stand to look at my hand. I can’t stand to see that my finger is still gone. I know it sounds so stu
pid, but I think I thought that if I could just get home, then things could go back to the way they were. I’d get you back, and I’d feel normal again, and my pinkie would, I don’t know, magically reappear or something.”

  He looks at me and he breathes in and then breathes out, all with great effort.

  “Do you want to sit?” I ask him, pulling him toward the sofa. I sit him down and I take a seat beside him. I put my hand on his back. “It’s OK,” I say. “You can talk about it. You can tell me anything.”

  “I just . . . I hate even thinking about it,” he says. “It was . . . awful. All of it. Losing my finger was maybe one of the most painful things I’ve ever been through. I have been working so hard to block it out.”

  I am quiet in the hopes that he will keep talking, that he will continue to be honest with me and with himself, that he will share what he’s been through, what plagues him.

  “I sliced it almost clean through,” he says finally. “Trying to open an oyster with a rock. I thought it might heal on its own but it wouldn’t. I lived with it growing more and more infected until I finally just had to . . .”

  I can see that he can’t bring himself to speak the words.

  But he doesn’t have to.

  I know what he can’t say.

  He had to cut off his own finger.

  Somewhere in the years he’s been gone, he was forced to save his hand the only way he could.

  “I’m so sorry,” I say to him.

  I can’t imagine what else happened, how many days he went without food, how near he came to grave dehydration, the searing pain of being stung over and over as he was trying to swim to rescue. But I am starting to think that he will tackle that pain when he is ready, talking and admitting more as he grows stronger. It will be a long process. It may even be years until he can unpack it all. And even then, he’ll never be able to erase it completely.

  The same way I’ll never be able to erase the ache of grieving him.

  These are the things that have made us who we are.

  I step away from Jesse for a moment and head into the kitchen. I look through the cabinets and find an old box of Earl Grey.

  “How about some tea?” I offer.

  He looks up at me and nods. It is so gentle as to be almost imperceptible.

  I put two mugs of water in the microwave. I grab the tea bags.

  “Keep talking,” I say. “I’m listening.”

  His voice picks up again and I realize that he must have, whether it was conscious or subconscious, been waiting for permission.

  “I think I’ve been trying to undo the last however many years,” he says. “I’ve been trying to put everything back the way it was before I left so it can be as if it never happened. But that doesn’t work. I mean, obviously it doesn’t. I know that.”

  I stop the microwave before it beeps, pulling the mugs out and putting the tea bags in. The smell of the tea reminds me of Marie. I sit back down next to Jesse, putting his steaming cup in front of him. He takes it into his hand but he doesn’t drink it yet.

  “I’m not the same person that I was back then,” he says. “You know it and I know it, but I just keep thinking that with a little effort, I can change that. But I can’t. I can’t, can I?”

  He puts the mug down and starts gesticulating with his hands. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in Acton,” he says. “I’ve spent too long trapped somewhere I didn’t want to be. I want to go back to California. I respect that Blair Books means as much to you as it does, but I don’t get it. We worked so hard to move away from New England, to get away from the life that our parents were pushing us toward. We sacrificed so much so that we could travel, not so that we could stay in one place. I don’t understand why you came back here, why you chose to spend your life here, doing exactly what your parents always told you you should do.

  “I’m really, really angry, deep down in my heart. And I wish that I didn’t feel that way and I hate myself for feeling it. But I’m furious that you could fall in love with someone else. I know you say that it doesn’t mean you forgot me, but, you know, at least right now, it sure sounds like it to me. And I’m not saying that we couldn’t get past that, if everything else about us made sense, but . . . I don’t know.

  “I’m mad at you and I’m mad at Friendly’s for turning into a Johnny whatever you called it. I’m mad at almost everything that changed without me. I know I need to work on that. I know it’s just one of the strings of issues that I’m facing. I know I said that now was supposed to be the easy part but I don’t know why I thought that. Coming home is hard. This was always going to be hard. I’m sorry I didn’t see that until now.

  “Of course I’ve changed. And of course you’ve changed. There is no way we could be the same after losing each other; we meant too much to each other for that to happen. So, I guess what I’m saying is that I’m miserable and I’m angry, but I guess I do get it. What you said in that letter makes some sense to me. You had to let go of me if you were ever going to have a chance at a normal life. I know you loved me then. I know it wasn’t easy. And, obviously, I know this is hard for you, too. I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t see what you see.”

  He puts his arms around me, pulling me close to him, and then he says what has taken us days to understand.

  “We loved each other and we lost each other. And now, even though we still love each other, the pieces don’t fit like they used to.”

  I could make myself fit for him.

  He could make himself fit for me.

  But that’s not true love.

  “This is it for us,” Jesse says. “We’re over now.”

  I look in his eyes. “Yeah. I think we are.”

  After everything we’ve been through, I never predicted it ending like this.

  Jesse and I stay still, holding each other, not yet ready to fully let go. His hands are still a little bit frozen. I take them in my own. I hold them, sharing the heat of my body.

  He pulls one hand away to brush a hair off of my face.

  I think, maybe, this is what true love means.

  Maybe true love is warming someone up from the cold, or tenderly brushing a hair away, because you care about them with every bone in your body even though you know what’s between you won’t last.

  “I don’t know where we go from here,” I say.

  Jesse puts his chin on my head, breathing in. And then he pulls away slightly to look at me. “You still don’t have to be back until late tomorrow, right?”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “So we can stay,” he says. “For another day. We can take our time.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m saying that I know what’s ahead of us, but . . . I’m not ready yet. I’m just not ready. And I don’t see why we can’t spend a little bit more time with each other, a little bit more time being happy together. I’ve waited so long to be here with you; it seems silly to squander it just because it won’t last.”

  I smile, charmed. I consider what he’s saying and realize that it feels exactly right to me, like being handed a glass of water just as you realize you’re thirsty. “That sounds good,” I say. “Let’s just have a nice time together, not worry about the future.”

  “Thank you.”

  “OK, so until tomorrow, you and I will leave the real world on the other side of that door, knowing that we will face it soon. But . . . for now, we can let things be the way they were, once.”

  “And then tomorrow we go home,” Jesse says.

  “Yeah,” I say. “And we start to learn how to live without each other again.”

  “You’ll marry Sam,” Jesse says.

  I nod. “And you’ll probably move to California.”

  “But for now . . . for one more day . . .”

  “We’ll be Emma and Jesse.”

  “The way we were.”

  I laugh. “Yeah, the way we were.”

  Jesse builds a fire and then joins me on the sofa. He puts h
is arm around me and pulls me into the crook of his shoulder. I rest my head on him.

  It feels good to be in his arms, to be satisfied with this moment, to not wonder what the future holds. I relish the way he feels next to me, cherish the joy of having him near. I know I won’t always have it.

  It starts snowing again, small flurries landing on the already white ground. I get up from Jesse’s arms and walk over to the sliding glass doors to watch it fall.

  Everything is quiet and soft. The snow is white and clean, not yet crushed under the weight of boots.

  “Hear me out,” I say, turning back to Jesse.

  “Uh-oh,” he says.

  “Snow angels.”

  “Snow angels?”

  “Snow angels.”

  As soon as we step out into the snow, I realize the flaw in my plan. We will sully the unsullied snow by walking in it. We will crush the uncrushed just by being here.

  “Are you sure this is what you want to do?” Jesse asks me. “Imagine how good it will feel to watch a movie inside by the fire.”

  “No, c’mon, this is better.”

  “I’m not sure about that,” Jesse says, and from the tone of his voice, I now understand why people sometimes describe the air as “bitter cold.” The cold is not bitter. They are bitter about the cold.

  I run ahead, hoping he’ll catch up to me. I try to remember what it felt like to once be a teenager with him. I trip and let myself fall. I drop face-first into the snow. I turn around. I see Jesse running to catch up with me.

  “Come on, slowpoke,” I say as I stretch my arms out and widen my legs. I windshield-wiper them back and forth, until I hit the icy snow that has crystalized onto the grass beneath it.

  Jesse catches up and plops himself down next to me. He extends his limbs and starts pushing the snow out of the way. I get up and watch him.

  “Nice work,” I say. “Excellent form.”

  Jesse stands and turns to look at his creation. Then he looks at mine.

  “You can say it,” I tell him. “Yours is better.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up,” he says. “Some people just have a natural raw talent for snow art. And I’m one of them.”