Happy After All

by Maisey Yates

Sometimes I wonder if I’m repeating the same dynamics here. Trying to fit in somewhere that doesn’t really need me. Where I’m not really wanted.

I’m just six months after. There was a before. I was a different person before, and I had a different life. I had different dreams. I was planning for a different future.

“I would think a woman of your gravitas would be reading something more worthy.” “I like to read books with penises,” Alice says, waving a hand, not bothering to look up. “Because I don’t have them in my real life, and I don’t want them. They’re best in fiction.”

“They’re harmless,” I say. “Why do you think that?” “They’re old ladies,” I say. “Why would you think a person would get less dangerous with time? It seems to me that their life experience and the willingness of others to underestimate them only makes them more dangerous.”

I feel hollow. I already know there’s nothing insightful or deep to say to something like this. I already know that the void grief leaves is so vast and empty there are no incantations you can fling down into the pit that will begin to fill it. “I’m sorry,” I say, because there is nothing good enough, so I might as well say that. There were so many times I wished people would say something that simple, that easy to me. That instead of trying to make me feel better they could just say sorry. That instead of telling me I could try again, that there was probably a reason it had happened, they would have just said sorry. Because they don’t have to be sorry, and it doesn’t fix anything. But neither do platitudes. Neither does silence.

“I don’t know how to get over it,” I say. “I left it behind instead.”

I can remember clearly one of my friends saying to me afterward that she would never have been able to be as strong as I was. It didn’t feel like a compliment, even though I knew she meant it as one. I had no choice but to keep breathing. To keep going. I didn’t feel strong; I felt weak and broken. I still do. That’s the real tragedy of it. You go on.

Maybe that’s why there’s a strange sort of finality to so many things he says. Maybe that’s why when he says things like life is too short, he doesn’t mean himself. In some ways, I wonder if he feels like he’s done. He ran the race. He completed the task. Why would he ever want to do it again? It’s not a wound so much as a sense of completion. It isn’t really as sad or hopeless a realization as I might’ve thought.

We’re meant to be, I’m convinced of that. We’re meant for this moment. It’s just that the moment is destined to be shorter than I want it to be.

JB

“Oh, it’s amazing to think, it’s been so many years. So many I don’t count up how old she would have been.” She lets out a gentle sigh. “Because there is no would have or could have, only what is. I do think, though, about how long I’ve loved her.”

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.

The truth is, somebody who’s been made to feel like you do, all of your life, someone who felt the way I did because of my dad, we are way more likely to keep repeating that cycle in every relationship we have. Because we’ll take anything.”

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.

I think how much it must’ve meant to him, coming from a family where he was very different from his parents, from his brothers, and finding someone who not only accepted him but who did it while not being exactly the same person he was.

I know what I want. I’m not asking him for everything; I’m just asking him to try, and he won’t do that, so there is no more conversation to have.

mk