"I hate it when they get like this," Katie says.
"They just do it cause they love you so much," you say. It is both true and the Thing to Say.
"That doesn't make it easier.When I was little, I used to wish they would die." Katie says, in a tiny little voice. "I think everyone wishes that about parents. No more nagging, no more rules..."
"No, not like that. So I wouldn't have to choose." "Choose?"
"Between my mom and my dad. See, I like being at my dad's cause all my friends still live there. I like being at my mom's because I miss her when I'm not and she has more time for me."TBC

"There's nothing wrong with that, is there?"
"No, but they both want to be the one I love the best. I can't pick."
"No, you can't. Do you want a peanut butter sandwich?"
"Ok. And I'm still glad they didn't. Die, I mean."
You get out the peanut butter and the bread. Your movements in the kitchen are both slow and deliberate.Katie takes this as a struggle;most able-bodied people do, in your experience. Or is it that Americans expect everyone to be fast? TBC

"I can help you with that, if you want." Katie says. "No, I've got it. I'd like to tell you it gets bettter. With your parents. And it will, kind of. Time helps, but you're never going to wake up one day and have it all make perfect sense." "Really?"Everyone else tells me I'll understand when I am older. I hate that. It's just something they say so they don't have to tell me things."
You remember that feeling. Also, the sense that one day you would wake up and understand everything. You held it until the middle of college when reality took it away. You miss it more than your last boyfriend. END And that's it, except for a truly eye-rolling moment where a character actually says "Nobody's perfect." which seemed clever as fuck once upon a time, but now makes me cringe.

What's the problem, erika?

If it feels anvilly to you, then get back to the objective correlative. You know - the concrete things and gestures that can carry the import of the story.

It might be a little too explicit and summarizing here:

You remember that feeling. Also, the sense that one day you would wake up and understand everything. You held it until the middle of college when reality took it away. You miss it more than your last boyfriend.

I'd say take out "when reality took it away" and then find a physical detail that she would miss about her boyfriend (which you can set up earlier in the story) that she misses. So something like...

You remember that feeling and the faith that one day the world would make sense. You miss it. You miss it more than waking up looking into [ex-boyfriend's] untroubled, sleeping face.

Well, looking at it now, feels like I'm trying too hard to go"See, look. Irony? What looks normal isn't, get it!(Although divorce is certainly normal enough now, but you know what I mean, right?)

What looks normal isn't, get it!

Well, but that's the basic premise of the whole story. It's not a useless epiphany - it's all in the execution whether you can get that across. You just don't want it too pat.

Well, right, exactly.

Well, right, exactly.

Okay, now that we've agreed that pat anvilly epiphanies are poor literature, what do you want to do with the story?

What can make it better?

Sometimes you can't just rework the ending, you need to go back through the story and see what you can do to lead the story to a more interesting place. If you just focus on the ending you'll get frustrated because you don't have enough options.

Things that make it less anvilly might include going back and building up the parallels between the girl and the main character so there's more payoff with the epiphany. Making either of the characters more complex/ambiguous themselves. For example, the girl could be voicing a real complaint and also be self-involved or unsympathetic.

I dunno - kind of depends on the rest of the story (which I haven't seen) and what you want to do with it.

Well, do you want to? Read the rest of it? This is an honest question, not a command-as-question.

Yay. Found my problem. Not all of it maybe, but...the original for this story was on a computer that is pining for the fjords.A few months later, on new PC, I get new idea, write it in, attempting to copy original because with typical lack of respect for own efforts, did not back up work, so there is at least one missing scene. Which, because I have lived with this so long, does not appear to be missing any longer AFAIC, but will affect readers that don't live in my brain.You know,because it leads to a bigger audience in the long run.Thank you so much, Hec. Because looking at your own work for yourself doesn't always work.Asking you helped me see what was really on the page, not what I was thinking of writing. Half the movies that don't make sense probably have that problem.