"People We Meet on Vacation" +

[fiefoe]

Emily Henry seems really popular right now, if one's to judge from Zlibrary homepage. Snappy dialog, running in-jokes, likable characters were quite enough to carry the day, so what if the central conflict that kept the lovers apart for nearly the whole length of the book seems trivial and artificial?

• I swipe it up so quickly that a fair amount of tequila sloshes over the lip, and with a preternatural and highly practiced speed, Alex jerks my other arm off the bar before it can get liquor splattered on it. <> “See? Wolfish gleam,” Alex says quietly, seriously
• Her winged eyeliner could slice through an aluminum can, and her emerald eyes could crush it afterward.
• I used to write these notes in a kind of panic, like every experience I hoped to someday have was a living thing growing in my body, stretching branches out to push on my insides, demanding to break out of me.
• There’s a literal list pushpinned into a wall by the cubicles (Toruń is not on this list) of Places R+R Will Not Cover. Each entry is in her handwriting and dated, and there’s something of an underground betting pool on when a city will be freed from the List.
• At the end of every month, she does a post with the worst, unedited outtakes from her photo shoots, the caption reading: THIS IS A FEED OF CURATED IMAGERY MEANT TO MAKE YOU PINE FOR A LIFE THAT DOES NOT EXIST. I GET PAID FOR THIS. <> Yes, she went to art school.
• “No, you’re tiny,” she corrects me, “and wear loud patterns. Your style is, like, 1960s Parisian bread maker’s daughter bicycling through her village at dawn, shouting Bonjour, le monde whilst doling out baguettes.”
• “Millennial ennui.” “Is that a thing?” I ask. “Not yet, but if you repeat it three times, there’ll be a Slate think piece on it by tonight.”
• For a fairly chaotic person, that’s a slippery slope. If I went to a shelter to pick up a foster dog, there’s no guarantee I wouldn’t come home having adopted six of them and a wild coyote. <> “I’m saying,” Rachel replies, “that purpose matters more than contentment. You had a ton of career goals, which gave you purpose. One by one, you met them. Et voilà: no purpose.”
• when you lose your happiness, it’s best to look for it the same way you’d look for anything else.”... “By retracing your steps,” Rachel says. “So, Poppy, all you have to do is think back and ask yourself, when was the last time you were truly happy?”
• the Fasnacht festivals of Switzerland, with their masked parades and whip-wielding jesters dancing down the candy-colored streets.
• And then we came to one of those big, hollowed-out trunks along the trail, the kind that’s cracked open to form a woody cave, its two sides like giant cupped palms. <> We slipped inside and curled up on the dry, needly earth. We didn’t nap, but we rested. Like, instead of absorbing energy through sleep, we drew it into our bodies through the centuries of sunshine and rain that had cooperated to grow this massive tree protecting us.
• I’m grinning hugely now, and buzzing too. It’s surreal how much this feels like the early days of our friendship, when every new text seemed so sparkly and funny and perfect, when every quick phone call accidentally turned into an hour and a half of talking nonstop, even when we’d seen each other a few days before. I remember how, during one of the first of these—before I would’ve considered him my best friend—I had to ask him if I could call him back in a second so I could go pee. When we got back on the phone, we talked another hour and then he asked me the same thing.
• I nod. “It’s settled. The feminization of boats is hereby overturned.” <> “Glad we got that taken care of,” he says.
• By the end of our first road trip home I knew enough about him to understand that his walking into our tiny house filled to the brim with knickknacks and dusty picture frames and dog dander would be like a vegetarian taking a tour of a slaughterhouse.
• when we hug, almost pulling me off the ground but never tightening so much that the embrace could be considered bone-crunching. <> It’s more like sculpting. Gentle pressure on all sides that briefly compresses us into one living, breathing thing with twice as many hearts as we should have.
• But for that other five percent of the time, there’s this what-if. <> It never lasts long or pushes too hard. It just sits there, cupped between our hands, a gentle thought without much weight behind it: What would it be like to kiss him?
• “Because I need to be well rested when I meet Death.”
  “Because you need to be well rested when I get tired in Butchart Gardens and make you carry me the rest of the way.”
  “I knew there was a reason you brought me with you.”
  “I didn’t bring you with me to be my mule,” I argue. “I brought you with me to be my patsy. You’re gonna cause a diversion as I run through the dining room of the Empress Hotel during high tea, stealing tiny sandwiches and priceless bracelets off unsuspecting guests.”
• We’ve been playing this game since we got on the highway heading into the desert. Sasha the Ceramicist had mentioned in her post about the car that its air-conditioning came and went at random, but she’d left out the fact that she’d evidently been using it to hotbox for five years straight.
  “It aspires to live long enough to see the end of all human suffering,” I add.
  “This car,” Alex says, “isn’t going to live long enough to see the end of the Star Wars franchise.”
• “Why, because I’m a woman, and they’ll take your Midwestern masculinity away if you don’t fall on the sword of every gender norm presented to you?” <> “No,” he says. “Because if you sleep on that, you’ll wake up with a migraine.”
• I’m so relieved it actually exists—and that the keys are under the floor mat in the back seat, just like the car’s owner, Esmeralda, said they would be—that I start clapping at the sight of it.
  “Wow,” Alex says, “this car is really speaking to you.”
  “Yes,” I say, “it’s saying, Don’t let Alex drive.”
• The ride itself is a violent affair, the taxi’s motor so loud I have to scream into Alex’s ear, my hair slapping against his face from the wind, to say, “THIS MUST BE WHAT A ROCK FEELS LIKE WHEN YOU SKIP IT OVER WATER,” my voice thunking in and out with each rhythmic hit of the little vessel against the top of the dark, choppy waves.
• And now I’m crying because reading this story makes me feel for the first time that I’m not in my body. Like there’s some bubble that stretches around me and Alex and makes it so we’re just two different colored globs in a lava lamp, mixing freely, dancing around each other, unhindered.
• He nods. “I know. You asked me who I was, and—it was like the answer came out of nowhere. Sometimes it feels like I didn’t even exist before that. Like you invented me.” <> Heat rushes to my cheeks, and I adjust my position in my seat, pulling my knees into my chest. “I’m not smart enough to have invented you. No one’s that smart.”
• Then there comes the moment that we ran through the downpour from BAR to our car, the ones spent listening to the windshield wipers squeak across the glass as we sliced through the torrential rain back to our rain-soaked bungalow. <> I’m getting closer to that moment, that one I keep reaching for and coming up empty-handed, as if it were nothing but a bit of reflected light, dancing on the floor.
• And here it comes, the moment that keeps slipping through my fingers, like it’s the game-changing detail in an instant replay I can’t seem to pause or slow down.
  We are just looking at each other. There are no hard edges to grab hold of, no distinct markers on this moment’s beginning or end, nothing to separate it from the millions just like it.
  But this, this is the moment I first think it.
  _I am in love with you.
  The thought is terrifying, probably not even true. A dangerous idea to entertain. I release my hold on it, watch it slip away.
  But there are points in the center of my palms that burn, scorched, proof I once held it there.
• His hand rises to sweep a damp curl out of my eyes, tucking it behind my ear. The lump seems to melt, and the truth slips out of me like a breath I’ve been holding all this time.
• “God, how are you so good at this,” I say, and his laugh grates against my ear as he kisses behind it.
  “Because I know you,” he says tenderly, “and I remember what you sound like when you like something.”
• You watch someone date all these people, and you see how different they are with each of them, and then you watch them choose. Some people choose the person they have the best chemistry with, or that they have the most fun with, and some choose the one they think will make an amazing father, or who they’ve felt the safest opening up to. It’s fascinating. How so much of love is about who you are with someone.”
• If our friendship had cost him the woman he wanted to marry. I feel sick, ashamed by the thought. Guilty over how I ignored my more complicated feelings for him so I could justify staying in his life.
  It’s one thing when your boyfriend’s rowdy brothers, or his widower father, need him.
  But I was just some other woman, whose needs he’d always put first to the detriment of his own wants and happiness.
• I loved her in this way that feels . . . so clear and easy to understand, and manageable.” <> He breaks off, shaking his head again. The tears in his eyes make them look like the surface of some river, dangerous and wild and gorgeous. “I don’t know how to love someone as much as I love you,” he says. “It’s terrifying.
• And I feel sympathy for him, of course. He’s lost someone he loved. Again.
  But so have his sons, and standing here with him, while he tears up freely, grieves like every person deserves to, there’s also something like anger building up in me.
  Because next to me, Alex ironed out all his own emotion as soon as he saw his father approaching, and I know that’s no coincidence.
• “And thus my fetish of Alex Nilsen Exhibiting Self-Care was born,” I say, and he sneaks a quick kiss on the side of my head.
• I started laughing from relief. We parted ways as friends. I didn’t cry. The last six months had been a slow unbraiding of our lives. The breakup was just the snip of one last string.
• and (c) even if I could, it would be humiliating to admit that I feel exactly like that incapable, lost, melancholy stereotype of a millennial that the world is so fond of raging against.
• He sniffs through a laugh, cups my jaw in his hands, and presses his forehead against mine, his eyes closing as his breath syncs with mine, our chests rising and falling like we’re two waves in the same body of water. “I never want to live without this,” he whispers, and I knot my fists into his shirt as if to keep him from slipping through my fingers. <> The corners of his mouth twist as he breathes out, “Tiny fighter.”

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"Snow" by John Crowley

• Now that those looks are all but gone, I can look back on myself as a young hunk and see that I was in a way a rarity, a type that you run into often among women, far less among men, the beauty unaware of his beauty, aware that he affects women profoundly and more or less instantly but doesn’t know why; thinks he is being listened to and understood, that his soul is being seen, when all that’s being seen is long-lashed eyes and a strong, square, tanned wrist turning in a lovely gesture, stubbing out a cigarette. Confusing. By the time I figured out why I had for so long been indulged and cared for and listened to, why I was interesting, I wasn’t as interesting as I had been.
• their Wasp hovered over them like a Paraclete and made them self-conscious in the extreme—they seemed to be constantly rehearsing the eternal show being stored up for their descendants. Their deaths had taken over their lives, as though they were pharaohs.
• myself had just then begun to be problematic to me, something that had to be figured out, something about which evidence had to be gathered and weighed. I was thirty-eight years old.
• I also understood something else. If access was truly random, if I truly had no control, then I had lost as good as forever those scenes I had seen. Odds were on the order of eight thousand to one (more? far more? probabilities are opaque to me) that I would never light on them again by pressing this bar. I felt a pang of loss for that afternoon in Ibiza. It was doubly gone now. I sat before the empty screen, afraid to touch ACCESS again, afraid of what I would lose.
• The Wasp had not been good at storage after all, no, no better than my young soul had been. Days and weeks had been missed by its tiny eye. It hadn’t seen well, and in what it had seen it had been no more able to distinguish the just-as-well-forgotten from the unforgettable than my own eye had been. No better and no worse—the same.
  And yet, and yet—she stood up in Ibiza and dressed her breasts with lotion, and spoke to me: Oh, look, hummingbirds. I had forgotten, and the Wasp had not; and I owned once again what I hadn’t known I had lost, hadn’t known was precious to me.
• Time, it turns out, takes an unconscionable time. The waste, the footless waste—it’s no spectator sport. Whatever fun there is in sitting idly looking at nothing and tasting your own being for a whole afternoon, there is no fun in replaying it.
• It restores your balance, in the end, even in a funny way your cheerfulness, when you come to know, without regrets, that the best thing that’s going to happen in your life has already happened. And I still have some summer left to me.