Georgia and Eli are exes who have come together to celebrate the wedding of one of their besties, and you know what happens when weddings and exes come together… I love a good second chance that really leans in hard on the message of finding oneself before another go on the love boat. Cheesy? Not even close.
It’s the realness. The relatability. The fear and self doubt and the love that comes through in those moments. It is how losing yourself in love only to lose it all and fighting hard to get it back and get it back even more. I love how open Georgia is with her feelings. I LOVE how Eli tries so hard to find his way back to himself because he’s been lost in this black hole of work life and imbalance and the fear of holding on to things he can only know for certain. The uncertainty that comes from him being untethered. Trying to get away from the shackles of his past life. A man who had nothing but his work whilst letting the most important people and things slip away from his life, so it becomes what sort of life? Empty and pointless. Eli is trying and we see his effort on page.
Jessica Joyce gives us two characters we can root for, we should root for, because we see us in them. This rat race of life that makes everything else fall apart, that makes it so life is only for work and the fears that come from that type of life. Eli is such a sweetheart and he gets to that point in life where we all want to get to, happiness, and it’s not in a pay cheque it’s in the spaces with people that matter. His list for Georgia is a way for him to hold on to them when she gone from his world. A way for him to guide himself out of the darkness into the lightness of what they once were and how Georgia finds her footing with him.
Love is messy and scary, it’ll make you doubt and run, but with the person who’s meant to be your person it makes the fears worth it.
Jessica Joyce takes us on a lesson of love. Love is in circles. An endlessness thought in life. Constant no matter the circumstance. Love is an endless moment and those are the circles which Joyce takes us around. The many facets of love and its rigmarole an endless cycle of the heart as it pumps and falters and breaths life into love and all its crevices and fissures, to fill slowly and surely. Love in all its surety and doubt. It’s highs and lows. Love in the places and people that colour your life and the depth to which you allow them impress upon your heart with their different colours. Imbibe the love in its rare depth.
When everything around you is falling apart but everything within and between you is falling into place, you get to see the dance between chaos and calm. Lovers reach and find each other in the rubble of chaos. Because wherever Georgia falls there is Eli to cushion her landing figuratively and otherwise.
I love that Eli leans into his feelings. He is able to pull us into the torture he’s been through all the time they have been apart, the harsh realisation that when you are so in love with a person but you keep coming up short for them because you are paralysed by fear of losing control in the other parts of your life that does not constrain you, but you reach for them anyway. Eli is such a darling such a lovely lovely man.
Set against the backdrop of their best friend’s wedding, whom at the end of the book I really wanted to give a good kicking to, because why are you so scatterbrain at your wedding planning and placing it all on the shoulders of two people you know have been through it in their own relationship? But can we talk? CAN WE TALK? Because… but anyways this was the perfect setting into which these two were thrown because they were either going to make it out alive in one piece of blow everything up and they very nearly did.
A love letter to falling in love, together or apart but reaching that place where you always reach for each other, that sacred space love occupies in the midst of the chaos.