Alison Cochrun

He is twenty-eight years old, sitting in the back of a limo with five drunk women on the first night of filming a new season of Ever After.

who love me when I fall as much as they love me when I fly.

But I’m always alone, have always been alone, and just because it’s Christmas doesn’t mean there’s any reason for that to change. You can feel just as lost and aimless at Christmas as any other time of the year.

The thing about snow is, it never lasts, and you’re always left a slightly dingier version of the world when it starts to melt.

“Today’s a big day,” Ari trills.

“Taylor Swift’s birthday?”

It’s a far more nuanced kind of mindfuckery, a deep-seated conviction that every social interaction is a test I’m predetermined to fail.

I can look at people and find them physically attractive in, like, an objective way. And I can develop crushes. But unless there is deep trust there, that crush is always going to feel kind of distant and abstract.”

“I thought you said you had plans tonight.”

“Yes,” I say. “Plans to cry.”

I think about destroyed life plans and
broken pieces and being paralyzed by my inability to put it all back together.

I can’t imagine moving through the world like that. He’s so fucking sure of where he belongs.