Status Updates From The Ex Vows

“I want to live in this liminal space where there's a heart beating hard against mine, someone who reaches for me first. It's why I've always loved early-morning sex. There's an instinct to it that no other time allows, just bodies and hearts doing what they want more than anything else.”

“I feel so many things—confusion wondering why now and not five years ago, sadness knowing the answer would likely devastate me, fear and pride and such an intense, unwelcome wanting-and I hope he doesn't see any of that.”

I was watching GMW clips today and thinking how one of the saddest tropes I know is “why didn’t you change for me?” And boom this book has/could be hitting it

“He's the same and totally different. The fifteen-year-old boy I liked and the twenty-year-old man I loved, and the twenty-eight-year-old I have to keep right here, because at one point he was the twenty-three-year-old man who broke my heart.”

“I just know that when Eli wraps his arms around my waist following a brief hesitation, it feels like coming home after the longest time away.
…If this is the actual last time we hug like this—for real, in happiness—then I'm going to revel in it. I have enough memories that hurt; what's one more?”

“I can't get distracted by the overwhelmingness of this brand-new Eli Mora. It's already wrapping around me like a vine, and there's nothing I want less than to get caught up in it, especially on land where vines are meant to grow.”

This is the second line about a vine, with the other being about a vine around her heart.

"I'm just wondering why you're willing to take that conversation on alone."

"Because I know it'll kill you to disappoint him, and because I'm used to it."

“Where we're all going to be together for what could realistically be the last time in a long while, if recent patterns continue and I move to Seattle.
I want it to be perfect—the wedding, the whole night, my part in it. If I'm going to leave, I want to plant that memory deep in the soil here, keep my roots to this place and these people.”

"It doesn't matter what I think."

"It actually does," he says, his voice low. "Very much."

“Needing people like that had only ever hurt me in the past. It was easier to shut down. Over the course of months, our singular, intertwining life turned plural and parallel, until the night it cracked under the pressure of everything we weren't saying. Everything we still haven't said.”

Well it’s obvious either Eli quit his job or something similar happened if he is completely ditching phone, laptop, promising work won’t get in the way, etc

"Work is the last thing on my mind. I'm here for you, for whatever you need.’ He's talking to Adam, but if I close my eyes, I can imagine some parallel universe version of him saying it to an alternate universe version of me. With the real Eli, work always comes first.”

“It's a talent he honed years ago at his sisters' request, and continued even after they stopped asking for them. I have dozens of my own in a Converse shoebox under my bed, all of them given to me first as a friend and then as a promise.”

Forming a piece of trash—this time, a gum wrapper—into paper rings