How to End a Love Story

You don't have to be completely healed to be everything I want. To be mine. I want every part of you, you silly infuriating woman. I love the parts of you I haven't even met yet.

Loving can hurt, and I want to do it anyway.

I'd rather have a fraction of you than all of someone else.

The kind of ending where someone else sees the best and worst of me and loves me back. We’d be happy together, we’d be sad together, we’d be everything together. And when it’s all over and we’ve reached another ending, my ashes would be scattered over the tree that grows from his body because till death do us part wouldn’t be enough, because I’d need more than one brief eternity with him.

I’m sorry for all the ways I hurt you while you were living, and I wish you could be sorry for all the ways you’ve hurt me since you died.

She loves her parents, she does, but it's a prickly, complicated love, and suddenly Helen is swept up in a hopeless feeling that maybe all she's capable of is prickly, complicated loving.

You don’t have to be completely healed to be everything I want. To be mine. I love every part of you, you silly, infuriating woman. I love the parts of you I haven’t even met yet.

You could keep me your dirty little secret, come to me tasting like other men, I’d still take you back every fucking time,” he says, a muscle ticking violently in his jaw. “I’d rather have a fraction of you than all of someone else.

Helen tries to remind herself that her least favorite thing about herself is how much she cares about what other people think. And that they probably aren’t thinking about her anyway.

It's suffocating, being loved by you." ... "You don't leave me an inch of space to breathe.

What are you doing?” she murmurs, as he drops back into his swivel chair lazily. He presses the felt tip of the marker to her inner right thigh and starts writing. “Giving you my address,” he says.

This is all I can give you," she whispers. "This is the best I can do." "I'll take it, you know I'll take it.

I love you so much, it doesn’t make sense to me in words.

He wants to hold on to this hurt and wrap it in plastic and store it somewhere safe, because it's probably all he'll ever have left of her.

Her heart seems ready to collapse with the weight of loving him.

You can still get hurt with your eyes wide open.

It starts snowing as she says it, and he feels like they’re living out the end of someone else’s rom-com. Maybe every movie ending has extras in the background just trudging through toward the rest of their lives.

I didn't like myself very much back then," she says. "And I worry, when I see people who knew me then, that they still see me the same way. So I make up mean stories about them in my head and they become less important, and it doesn't matter because I'll never see them again.

Mom, you spent two and a half decades telling me to focus on school and work and not to think about boys. Maybe the reason I’m not married is because I’m such a guai nui.” Such a good girl. It’s one of the only Cantonese phrases she knows, the one her parents and her grandparents would say to her as a compliment—when they were in front of their friends, when she did something they approved of, when they were reassuring each other in hushed tones after the funeral that Helen would never do something like this. Helen has always been a good girl. She remembers her frustration watching Michelle move through the world and finding ways to upset everyone, all the time. She had envied it a little bit too—the idea of just not caring seemed so foreign to her, she sometimes couldn’t believe they had the same parents. She recognizes an uncharitable feeling of resentment rise against her little sister, even all these years later.

You feel a lot of responsibilities for other people's feelings.

Maybe that's just how it feels right now and she'll be able to look back on this time with some kind of detached fondness someday. That even this keen sense of missing him will be something she grows to appreciate.

She thinks of how worried her mother was about earthquakes in this city and wonders if emotional earthquakes have the same kind of internal fallout—rattled bones, shaken foundations, everything hanging on the walls slightly askew.

…The kind of ending where someone else sees the best and worst of me and loves me back. We’d be happy together, we’d be sad together, we’d be everything together. And when it’s all over and we’ve reached another ending, my ashes would be scattered over the tree that grows from his body because till death do us part wouldn’t be enough, because I’d need more than one brief eternity with him.

If I heal and move on, I’m worried I’ll finally lose you for good.

If I was writing one of those science-fiction novels Dad used to read to us, I’d start by inventing time travel and going back to our last fight in my bedroom. I’d come knock on your door and I’d tell you I’m sorry, and I love you. And then I’d push that lever back even farther, and I’d find our grandparents and I’d teach them how to say those things to our parents first.

I'm not fine. I haven't been for a while, and I blamed you for so long because the last thing you ever did was teach me how much loving can hurt.

I'd rather have a fraction of you than all of someone else.' Helen swallows. 'I don't want that for you. For either of us. It's not--it's not healthy.' 'I don't want to be healthy,' Grant says, and his chest is heaving as if he's just run a marathon. 'I just want you.