Pack Up the Moon

by Kristan Higgins

It’s easy to cry and even panic over this stuff. But then I look around and see everything I have, and all that joy . . . it pushes everything else away.

She loved most people, and they all loved her right back.

But these days, it was hard not to blame someone. To want to kick God in the nuts. Thanks for nothing. I knew you didn’t exist.

It seemed like blond women valued their hair above all else, always calling attention to it.

“I don’t want to waste time feeling bad about what I don’t have when what I do have is all this.

“Whatever you choose, do with all your heart, and leave your mark,” he said, covering her hand with his. “If you’re going to be a bartender, be the bartender everyone loves to talk to, who invents the best drinks and makes you feel right at home. If you’re going to be a hairdresser, make every customer feel good about themselves.”

She missed her dad with a constant ache. She missed the reassurance, the comfort a good father brings a daughter.

Staying in the moment was better than wringing hands about the future.

The sadness shouldn’t cancel out what had been so bright and full and beautiful. Just because the cherry blossoms would fall didn’t mean you should mourn them on the tree.

Once you’d had a love like that, it would be futile to try to replicate it. Everything else would be a hollow imitation.

So, standing there in the church, all by myself. I pretended you were there, and I pretended to link my arm through yours, and I walked down like you were next to me, and I cried my damn head off. How could I be getting married without you? Why couldn’t you have lived, Dad?

She made the world happy. Everyone who knew her was better because of it.

Love wasn’t hard. It wasn’t complicated.

I believe in your goodness more than anything else in my entire life.

Don’t let me be your life’s tragedy. Let me be one of the best things that ever happened. One of the many best things that ever happened to you. Let our time together be a beautiful, happy time in your life that came to an end, but led to more happiness, more love.

Her dog. Her friend through all this. Pebbles’s tail wagged, but she stayed still, as if she knew her job.