Cold Pastoral 

Some quotes I enjoyed:

I didn’t want to be, but I was grateful. I kept it open beside my other document and began writing. I clicked on the link to his article, listened to the songs she mentioned and jotted down lyrics. I was so relieved and distracted by the new material that it wasn’t until thirty minutes later that I thought about Lauren for the first time without also thinking about myself. She loved Brian. It was so remarkably, indubitably clear. And whether or not he understood it, he’d loved her back. At first I’d thought it was a favor, some kind of thank-you for picking up the journal. But as I scrolled through her document again I realized that it had nothing to do with helping me. Nothing.

I thought about the things he’d said about her in his journal. The morning after they first kissed, when he’d spent forty minutes writing her a three-line email. The game of bowling where they got high in the bathroom, the way he’d described her collarbone and her smile and the first time he saw her band play in the basement during the storm. The first time they had sex and didn’t use a condom and the first time he came home with her for Thanksgiving and met her alcoholic mother and the discussion they’d had about it afterward. How he’d said he held her and told her it’d be O.K. and that he’d always be there. The bad poem he wrote for her and the good song she’d written for him. The time they thought she was pregnant and the time his grandfather died. How they’d said how much they loved each other and how they always would. How he worried he loved her more than she loved him and that she had a crush on a boy named Emmanuel. And I thought then of how he’d described things growing old. Growing similar, habitual. How he’d begun to wake up in the morning without rolling over to kiss her. How he’d started to resent the time away from his friends, her nagging habits. How he’d begun to look at other girls and compare her to the hypothetical. How’d she’d begun to ignore him, too, and how they’d gone along anyway for another six months, another year. How it’d ended and how he’d felt free and young and energized. But then how he’d begun to miss her. And doubt himself. And worry that they’d screwed things up forever. How he’d loved her, still, whether or not he understood it, and how, when it came down to it, I could never really compare.

I had their story in my bag. The secret that he, too, had never let things go. Had it tucked inside his journal with a note I’d slipped inside. Thanking her. Telling her I didn’t want to talk to her again because it would be too hard. But I looked at her then, with the tears dripping slowly down her thin cheeks and I knew, in the end, it’d be better if I kept it. Better if she never knew.

Found in The Opposite of Loneliness .