Happy After All

by Maisey Yates

There are moments when you can definitely feel that a phase of your life is over.

“I really think that what you could have with him . . . It could be real. It could be functional. He likes you. Sometimes I think that is the wildest missing piece to relationships. Someone feels like they love you, or they want to sleep with you, but they don’t like you. He likes you. I also think he might love you.”

This is my world. I’m captivated by the sight of him in it.

He doesn’t treat me like I’m broken. That is the most beautiful thing of all. Because I don’t want to feel broken. I don’t want to feel like something less than the woman he wanted before he knew the truth.

He isn’t as taciturn or difficult as he seems to think he is. He’s just been made to feel like he is.

I didn’t want to feel different, I didn’t want to be different. What was the point, after all?” She sits in silence for a moment. “But I am. I’m different, and my life is different than I planned for. Different doesn’t make it wrong, or bad, or failed. When I accepted that, I found a lot more peace.”

This is my first time trying to honor that world while I’m living in this one.

I have known love. Great and deep and terrible. Beautiful, destructive. Self-sacrificial. Selfish, sometimes. I’ve lived so many lives all in one. It is a life’s work to look back on all your years and see that what you are, what you felt, what you experienced, was enough all along.

As we’ve already discussed, Amelia, the loss of someone is the loss of the world. It’s also the loss of who you were before.”

“What if I can’t have everything?” “You’ll survive. You’ll keep on living. You’ll smile again. You’ll dream again. You get to be my age, and you realize that you had everything that was meant for you. So you might as well want it all, then see what comes.”

Because I can see her through his eyes. I can see how much he admired her. I can see her achievements through the lens of someone who loved her so much, and it humbles me. I have never had a single person in my life who looked at something that I did in this way.

“I think it’s fair. For a couple of kids who got dropped into lives they didn’t connect with,”

No wonder we both wanted to make worlds we can control.”

Some of what was wrong with us was me. Me not knowing what I wanted. Me not knowing how to tell him what I wanted.

I’m not talking about myself when I’m talking about my stories.” “You are, though,” I say. “They’re the deepest part of you. The part I think not even you see sometimes. I mean, that’s why we have to write, isn’t it?

He makes all the other sex I’ve ever had seem like sad warm-ups, while he’s the main event. With him, it’s like in my books. Straight out of my fantasies, off the page and into my bed. The next time someone tells me sex in romance is unrealistic, I’ll pity them.

I want to write the rest of my story, not just let it happen around me, not sit there staring at a blinking cursor, on hold because I’m scared.

The problem was, I was stuck in a thought that I had to heal from everything or heal from nothing. Where I thought I had to sort of deny everything that I had been through, or I was going to have to do this incredibly impossible work. But I don’t have to get over it. I don’t have to get over the pain. It’s there. It’s part of everything. It’s part of love, it’s part of life. It’s part of being happy. When I look at the faces of all my darling old ladies, I see the lines. From happiness, from anger, from sadness. It’s all there, and it’s all part of them. We don’t get out of life without it.”

“You have to do the work of healing. You just do. Because if you don’t . . . then all you have is the pain. It’s there, beneath the surface, whether you want it to be or not.

I didn’t choose it. So I will be damned if I won’t take a chance and choose good things when I have the opportunity to do it. I am not choosing broken. Not when I can choose whole.”

He is terrified, because his world ended. And to dream, to hope, to wish, to build something new is extraordinarily terrible, and I know it. It’s also the only way. The only way to find a life that isn’t shrouded in darkness, that isn’t defined by loss.

His dear, familiar face. I see those lines, all that pain. I want to make new lines on his face. From smiling. From laughing. From loving me.

It could only ever be you.”

I’m warmed by this, all the way through. It’s true for me too, I realize. It’s not just acceptance, but a deep understanding and appreciation.