Happy After All

by Maisey Yates

There was a before. I was a different person before, and I had a different life. I had different dreams.

I reflect on how aspects of today felt similar to the last emergency I survived.

The one that stole part of myself. The one that changed everything. This is different. But it reminds me of those feelings all the same. It reminds me of loss and despair on a profound level,

tomorrow I’m going to get up, and I’m going to be the hero in my own life. The one I need. That is the perk to being single. I’m not go...

drove through the burned end of town and I nearly choked on my grief. The hollow, black skeletons that were once houses and businesses are too awful to bear. I don’t know how anyone who lost their possessions, their home, their safety, is managing it.

The theme here coincides all too closely with the socal fires. Eaton, pacific palisades…

He spent months looking through me when we lived in the same house.

grumpy, withdrawn, and generally cranky who seems like he’s exploding with integrity he didn’t ask for.

pretend it isn’t there. I withhold joy from it. I withhold satisfaction.

Sex for me has generally been part of a relationship, and even then, the most important component to me has always been maintaining emotional closeness through the physical connection.

it might surprise you to learn that I’m sometimes emotionally unavailable.”

We fail our friends in the same ways, and we have the same fights with our significant other. Over and over again. Each and every time we have to hit these mini crises, and if we want to move past them, we have to drain a little poison out of the wound. A little bit each time, and next time maybe we won’t fall as hard.”

It’s the same reason Elise won’t drop her guard and give herself what she wants. The sad truth is, you protect the wound, and it begins to protect you. So you guard it at all costs.

“I think I ended up where I was supposed to be.”

“We didn’t have anything in common,”

I mean, we were married for years. So of course I did. But . . . she was really the first person who didn’t try to change me. That’s a pretty rare thing.”

I can’t think if I’ve ever been in a relationship where I didn’t feel like I had to change. Maybe that isn’t fair. Because I changed myself pretty substantially

Maybe that’s someth...

I find it much easier to recast myself in a different role when I go somewhere new. I’m afraid of myself. Or at least parts of me. And I would never have said that before this moment, but it’s how I feel.

Maybe I’m the girlfriend that didn’t matter enough when I couldn’t be the support system my boyfriend needed me to be. When my pain was bigger

I’m just Amelia. Amelia Taylor, the same as I’ve always been. Never quite being enough.

It shows people dealing with issues and living. That’s what we all have to do, deal with shit and keep going.

I feel a sort of giddy happiness inside me, but this kiss isn’t giddy. It’s dark and rich, like everything with him.

He is the flourless chocolate torte of men. Powerful, overwhelming. Except I don’t feel like I can overdose on him. Every bit I have just makes me want more. That’s the only part that scares me a little bit.

I try to just feel. But feeling is complicated. It isn’t just my body. It’s my soul. My heart. Everything.

Drifting off to sleep with that feeling is the best one I can remember.

We finish our pizza, and then we’re just sitting, underneath the lights, the stars. I lean against his shoulder, and I take a deep breath. I smell his soap, his skin, the pine trees. I’ve never felt happiness that hurt so much. Like Christmas itself, I guess.

“When you feel so happy, and then you just lose it. It comes from nowhere.”

I don’t dwell on what isn’t. But I remember.”

life is made up of pain and loss. That the happy endings happen between the unbearable.

When I’m a mighty oak, like Alice, I’ll be shaped by all of it. It’s my pain, which means it’s up to me to try to decide what to do with it.

What I’m certain of, for the first time since everything fell apart, is that I’ll be happy. Truly happy. Because the lines on these women’s faces are not all from tears. They have smiled, and they still do. After loss. After hardship. 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.

I know what it costs to hope now. To strive for happiness. It is so much heavier, but I imagine when I was younger. When I hadn’t lost anything. I’ve been afraid to imagine my future. Now I’m not.

part of me feels like it can rest. Because this is a happy ending. If it’s all I ever have, it’s a pretty damned good life.

A good world. I dragged myself here. Wounded. Bleeding. Exhausted. I’ve been afraid to start this new chapter. I’ve let the page stay blank for far too long. I was scared of what it would look like to start writing Amelia again. This changed version of me who won’t be able to keep the subtext of grief out of this new chapter. Maybe out of all the chapters after. I feel different about it now. I feel an acceptance of it. More than that, I feel ready to start. To see where it takes me, how it changes me, who I become. My life doesn’t have to be a blank page. It’s time for me to start writing my own story.

The thing about running is it’s not closure. It’s just leaving things behind. But if you run too fast, you leave the door open, and all kinds of shit follows you. Whether you mean it to or not. Letting shit follow you isn’t the same as working it out either.”

He certainly didn’t try with me. He was frustrated. I was lagging behind him as far as he was concerned. He wanted to get back to the way things had been. Then, when I couldn’t meet his needs, rather than continuing to try with me, he found somebody else. That’s the bottom line. I’m not saying he can’t change now. I’m not saying he can’t make a different decision with this woman he’s engaged to now. But unless he’s dealt with the thing that made him treat me the way he did, he’ll do the same thing to her. Even if we hadn’t lost her, I think eventually he would have cheated. Not because there’s something wrong with me.” Those words are a revelation. A breakthrough. “There’s nothing wrong with me,”

I’m not the problem, though. I’m not.”

You can be married to somebody who doesn’t know you for a very, very long time.

I have to make sure I don’t isolate myself from the people who care for me.”

didn’t go in and talk to my mother yesterday. There is nothing for me to learn from her. There’s nothing that matters. Not there, in that sad, dilapidated house. I won’t learn anything by shining a flashlight in the dark corners of my childhood. Picking over the bones of all my disappointment.

It occurs to me that life has done a decent job of bringing love to me. Even when I wasn’t looking for it.

“I want to thank you. I have a mother, and she can’t love anyone but herself. When I needed her the very most, she wasn’t there for me.” I close my eyes. “Not just one time. So many times. I needed wisdom, and I didn’t have a mother who could give it. I needed love, and I didn’t have a mother who could give it.”

“You know,” Alice says, “people say dreadful things sometimes. They don’t know they’re dreadful. They say them without thinking. They say them without considering who they might be talking to. I have heard, countless times, that a woman doesn’t know love until she has a child. There are a great many women who don’t really know love, even when they have children. Amelia, 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. Even now, here I am. With you. Here, in this place. It’s new. Even at ninety-five, there are still new people and places to see and be in. Believe me, my girl. I know love.” She puts her hand out and presses it over mine. “So do you.” I feel like this wisdom is unearned. Like I haven’t lived enough to hear it. I want her certainty. I feel like I do know love. More importantly, I’m starting to realize what I want it to look like in my life. Maybe I still want everything. Or maybe this is the first time I’ve actually wanted everything.

I wanted whatever he would give me. I was determined to bend myself into whatever shape worked. Until I couldn’t do that anymore. Until my feelings were bigger than his. Choosing those feelings, choosing myself, has been...

I didn’t have to ask anyone permission for anything. I didn’t have to consider someone else’s feelings. I wanted freedom more than I wanted romance. Freedom was something I hadn’t had in my life before. I’m not saying that he was a controlling man, or a bad one. It’s just that even in the nicest relationships, you have to consider each other. I wanted to be selfish. Like I said, I am an oak. I don’t wish to choose to bend around anything new, but that’s not to say there’s anything wrong with bending your life around someone.” She pauses for a long moment. “I think the most important truth is that I didn’t meet anyone who could hold a candle to the love of my life. I didn’t meet anyone who made me want romance more than solitude.

“They still wouldn’t have been the love of your life.”

the loss of someone is the loss of the world. It’s also the loss of who you were before.” I know this. I think about it all the time. The before and the after. “Marty was the love of my life, of my youth, the one who held me after our greatest loss. The one who formed so much of who I am. When he was gone, I had to find a different life. It stands to reason that for the new woman I was, shaped and changed by my grief, there could have been a love. There wasn’t, and I’m happy with it. I was never motivated enough to search for it.”

“You should never be anything less than the love of someone’s life, Amelia. So the question will simply be whether he’s smart enough to snag you or not.”

For the first time, I wonder if it’s a gift that I’m not yet a mighty oak. That I can still change and bend, because that’s the time of my life that I’m in.

Plot Moppet—a small child in a romance who exists solely to drive the plot forward or cause a shift in the romance between the main characters.