Happy After All

by Maisey Yates

People are too complicated to be sympathetic, generally speaking.

“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 never wanted to be with someone like me. I spend too much time thinking, too much time observing things around me rather than just living the things that are happening.

“Falling in love when everything is terrible is as brave an act as blowing shit up. Except it’s something regular, everyday people can choose to do. A radical act of real-life bravery.”

She might have to accept that sometimes you’re enemies with someone for your own good.

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.

I’ve learned that you can forge very meaningful friendships with people by focusing on the present.

I show up for the people here. For the people I care about. That makes my past immaterial, both to them and to me.

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

Thinking that you might love somebody again after you got broken apart by another person really does feel like the riskiest thing imaginable.

“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.”

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

I hope that even if I’m not the love of his life, I’m something. Because he certainly is to me.

A blank page has limitless possibilities, but at the same time, it’s nothing.

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.”

It’s my pain, which means it’s up to me to try to decide what to do with it.

“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. I did meet a man who made me forget myself. Who made me lose my head.

“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.”

“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.”

I don’t want to be trite about finding purpose in tragedy, but my God, if you don’t, everything just seems pointless.

Existence is risk. Caring is dangerous.”

She was the love of my life. That life. Not this one. This one—the one where I’m a difficult, closed-off, hopeful, wounded man—in this one, it’s you. It could only ever be you.”

“You are the only woman for the man I am now.”