The Seven Year Slip

There was something just so reassuring about books. They had beginnings and middles and ends, and if you didn’t like a part, you could skip to the next chapter. If someone died, you could stop on the last page before, and they’d live on forever. Happy endings were definite, evils defeated, and the good lasted forever.

loved how a book, a story, a set of words in a sentence organized in the exact right order, made you miss places you’ve never visited, and people you’ve never met.

Romance wasn’t in chocolate, it was in the gasp of breath as we came up for air. It was in the way he cradled my face, the way I traced my finger over the crescent-shaped birthmark on his collarbone. It was in the way he muttered how beautiful I was, the way it made my heart soar. It was in the way I wanted to know everything about him—his favorite

My aunt used to say, if you don’t fit in, fool everyone until you do. She also said to keep your passport renewed, to pair red wines with meats and whites with everything else, to find work that is fulfilling to your heart as well as your head, to never forget to fall in love whenever you can find it because love is nothing if not a matter of timin

Grief is a weird thing. It can be a monster on your shoulder. It can be a friend sitting with you at the table. It can be a memory in a smell—the soft, delicate notes of floral perfume. Grief can find you in the middle of the night as you roll over to go back to sleep. It can even find you in your dreams.

That was love, wasn’t it? It wasn’t just a quick drop—it was falling, over and over again, for your person. It was falling as they became new people. It was learning how to exist with every new breath. It was uncertain and it was undeniably hard, and it wasn’t something you could plan for. Love was an invitation into the wild unknown, one step at a

Because the things that mattered most never really left. The love stays. The love always stays, and so do we.

Sometimes the people you loved left you halfway through a story. Sometimes they left you without a goodbye. And, sometimes, they stayed around in little ways. In the memory of a musical. In the smell of their perfume. In the sound of the rain, and the itch for adventure, and the yearning for that liminal space between one airport terminal and the n

Every book is a time capsule. Who I am right now—as I’m writing this six months before The Seven Year Slip finds its way onto shelves—isn’t the person I’m going to be when you read this. Books are like a magical apartment in that way, capturing a singular point in time when an author writes a book that maybe, someday, a future you will visit and re