Happy After All

by Maisey Yates

“I think it’s a thing that takes time, gray hair, wrinkles, heartbreaks, and all kinds of moments when you cared too much. Then one day you realize . . . it never got you anywhere you wanted to go. The people who only want you when you bend and twist to suit them don’t stay anyway, and the ones who want you as you are settle in, and so do you.”

I’ve experienced the kind of sadness that drives people apart.

I’m here making my own life out of pieces of truth and omission.

Don’t postpone joy. I was in pain, and I had every reason to wait until I healed to start enjoying sunsets and pie and new friends. I took it as a sign from the universe. To try to let the joy exist alongside grief.

If I can do that, I can definitely choose to just enjoy the day.

There are great gaps in my own personal story I have no real desire to fill in for anyone. And haven’t. Not here. I’ve learned that you can forge very meaningful friendships with people by focusing on the present.

I’m never going to get tired of hearing him say my name.

I know what it’s like to feel like you’re drowning and have nobody there to grab hold of. So even though he isn’t reaching out, I can’t leave him thrashing there.

I also know that grief goes in waves. That sometimes the tide rolls out and you can see all these beautiful things left behind. Sea glass and seashells on the seashore. That sometimes the waves come back in hard and leave you breathless, drowning.

Nathan is temporary. When he leaves Rancho Encanto, I’m never going to have to see him again. We can dump all this pain into each other and then never have to deal with the consequences of it. We can indulge in pleasure and really, really feel like we deserve it because we know how bad so many other things have been. It’s ideal, in many ways.

“We can always lose something. Hell, we can always lose everything. I think the truly miraculous thing about life is that we keep loving anyway.”

He doesn’t get to decide how I feel about myself.

“In romance you drain the poison out. In one big cathartic fight. One catastrophic loss. The loss of the person who showed you that you needed to heal, and you have to let the poison go to be happy. It’s the same process. It just takes a little more time.”

The sad truth is, you protect the wound, and it begins to protect you. So you guard it at all costs.

Your parents should not treat you like a complication.”

at a certain point, everyone is at fault for continuing to allow it.”

she was really the first person who didn’t try to change me. That’s a pretty rare thing.”

Because we have lived life, experienced consequences. Heartbreak. And we’re still here.

We would never have met if our lives hadn’t crashed and burned.

The thing about grief is . . . it makes you so tired. It makes you way too tired to put on a facade. I have always felt things deeply. I spent my life hiding that.

He needed things to be okay on a surface level, and I needed to be devastated. We just couldn’t find each other.

To sit with someone else who knows is the most healing thing I never knew I needed.

Her life was real, a momentary thing. It was up to me what I decided to do with that love I had for her. I decided . . . slowly, over the course of time, that I could let that love be a gift. That I could remember it well.”

Alice is an oak. Because of the love in her life, but the loss in it as well. It isn’t an easy thing; it isn’t a simple thing. It is only doing the very hardest work, it is only being willing to take the next step forward when you cannot see where it’s taking you. It’s letting your face smile again so it can make new lines that are

forged by happiness and not just sorrow.

It isn’t just talking about it. It’s actually sitting in the wisdom of other women. It’s being in that community.

What I’m angry about is the lack of a mother who can give me the things most mothers can. I ache for a person who doesn’t exist, and no amount of confrontation is going to fix that.

It’s okay to want everything.” “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.”

We recognize each other, at the deepest places we carry our pain.

He is astonishingly proud of everything she does. He doesn’t love horses, not like she does. He understands that it matters to her, and because of that it matters to him. They pour so many resources into her endeavors. It is a very real support. He finds a way to love it because she does.

Slowing down always felt too scary. Now I realize I was running from exactly what I needed.

I wonder, not for the first time, if the right thing to do would be to build a monument for my grief. Except . . . I want the monument to be my life. I want my daughter’s life to matter. In that it made me do wild things, it made me embrace more of who I am. I want that to be my tribute to her.

Writing is how I learn about the world and myself.

There is nothing you can do to protect yourself if you actually want to live and have there be any point to it.

Grieving is comforting. Because it keeps you safe.”

“If I let it go, if I accept what happened, then I have to . . . open myself up again, and that’s terrifying.”

Hope is terr...

The work that goes into a happy ending is the hardest work. The world doesn’t value it. The work to be in love, the work to be happy. It’s the hardest work, but I’m willing to do it.