Other people’s words about … marriage
She’d thought true love was about being understood: about finding that person who could see the sadness in you, the peep show of crazy you kept from everyone else. But what if it was better to be misunderstood? Not to be reminded all the time, just by looking at your partner’s face, that the peep show was there? What if love wasn’t about sharing yourself completely, about yoking your secret sorrow to another’s, but about finding someone who made you forget yourself?
From ‘Dream State‘
By Eric Puchner
Cece, one of the protagonists in Erich Puchner’s novel Dream State, is a woman after my own heart. Having married Charlie, a man she is deeply in love with, she runs off with his best friend Garrett, a man whom she meets just before her wedding — the man whom Charlie has in fact asked to officiate the wedding, the man who (briefly? forever?) captures her heart in a way that Charlie can’t. Because Garrett understands Cece. Garret sees her. And it feels magic to Cece.
Or does it?
I love Puchner’s exploration of love in the passage I’ve quoted above. I love the idea that love — romantic love, enduring love, the love between two people — might be the opposite of a truth-finding mission, that it might instead be about finding someone who [makes] you forget about yourself. I love the idea that maybe sometimes that’s where the magic between two people lies: in the way they can help each other turn away from sorrow towards joy, towards their more beautiful selves. It’s a lovely, if also poignantly humorous, reworking of the idea of romance.
Easter table, 2026.
On the topic of stories about romance and love, I’ve just had a story of my own published, which is about a couple who meet and fall in love in Cairo. If you’d like to read it, you can find it over at The Marlowe Review. It’s called City of Light.
I have some other stories coming out this year, which I’ll provide links to here as they come out. I’m excited to be seeing my words in print, online, after all these years. Writers, I think, are a little like lovers — we write our stories to share our secret sorrow, but we also write stories in the hope that we can help a reader forget themselves for a little while as they lose themselves in our words.
That’s what we try for, anyway. That’s what I try for.
Lately I’ve been reading …
- The pendulum appears in the house in March. Abigail does not know if it has arrived by post or if her mother has bought it in a shop in the city: ‘The Pendulum’, a short story by Ea Anderson in Peatsmoke Journal.
- I thought for a time that my dad was a murderer. It was that first summer of vultures: red- headed drones, their wings pouring shadows onto our heads. Mobs of them shitting in parking lots and roosting in the alleyways downtown. Mobs of them, black and sinister: ‘Vultures, American Vultures’, a short story by Craig. M Foster in Quarterly West
- When we run out of nice things to say to each other, Gil and I watch TV like we’re each just a brain in a jar, sitting side by side. Except instead of brains we’re hearts. And by hearts, I mean sex organs. And by sex organs, I mean all we ever do anymore is fuck: ‘The Bright Jars of Our Bodies’, a piece of flash fiction by Sara Hills in Flash Frog
- The room is always quiet and milky and her little nails scratch a bit when they touch my hand, grasp my finger: ‘My Sister’s Life as a Series of Rooms’, a piece of flash fiction by Nora Nadjarian in Craft
- It was one of those drinking games. You go around the table, and each person says which memory they’d borrow from a parent to embody: ‘Heart’, a piece of micro fiction by David James Poissant in The Cincinnati Review
- My mother says my father’s 30-pound weight loss is the result of a renewed commitment to his health: ’The Wintering’, a story in one sentence by Maureen Aitken in Monkeybicycle
- For years I lived / as if my life were made of clay: ‘For years I lived’, a poem by Maggie Smith, from her latest collection, A Suit or a Suitcase (quoted in its entirety in Ron Charles’s substack, Free Time — scroll to the end of the post to find the poem)
- Body is something you need in order to stay / on this planet and you only get one: ‘Living in the Body’, a poem by Joyce Sutphen
twenty-one words 