Status Updates From The Ex Vows

"Don't tell Adam, but I think this wedding is going to be even better than the first attempt. Second time's a charm, right?"

“C’mere.”

“I don't begrudge Adam or Jamie for having their own lives and being busy, or for things shifting when I was away."
"Upheaval is kind of a shitty rite of passage in your twenties,"
"Right, but..."
"But it hurts all the same to feel far away," he says, and I hear it again, that heart-deep understanding.
I nod, imagining all the miles stretching between San Francisco and Seattle. Wondering how I'll bridge them.

“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.”