The Good Part

by Sophie Cousens

“And how are you liking this new life of yours, the good part, where everything’s sorted?” “Ha! Life is never sorted.” I narrow my eyes at the old woman. “Was that the lesson I was supposed to learn? Because if it was, you could have just told me that, I am very receptive to feedback.” “You wished it. So, tell me, is it a grand improvement on before?” she asks calmly, taking a pocket watch out of her waistcoat and checking the time. “Yes, and no. It’s complicated.” Then I look down at my wedding ring and say, “But also kind of wonderful.” “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” the old woman says, still sucking on her sweet. “Maybe you weren’t ready.”

‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ ”

“I want to go back. Please, I want to go back. I want to live every messy day—the good ones and the ones that suck—where I don’t know what I’m doing, and I don’t know where I’m going or how to get there. I want to go on all the shit dates, because then, when I meet the right person I will know how special he is. And when I find him, I don’t want to miss a minute. I don’t want to miss making him laugh for the first time, I don’t want to miss discovering that his eyes look green rather than blue when he wakes up in the morning. I don’t want to miss our first kiss, our first fight, our first anything. And I’ll take the heartache and the horror and the losses too, the fear of not knowing how it will all come to be, because that is life, in all its glorious, messy Technicolor. And I know I am so lucky to be here, and that every breath I take is the good part.”