If It Makes You Happy

by Julie Olivia

Give me two years in a single room with one person, and we’d still be strangers. Maybe that’s where I went wrong in my marriage.

You don’t tell anybody anything. Not me. Not your family. You keep all your emotions bottled up until they explode. Well, congratulations. Here’s your explosion.”

Copper Run smells like crunching leaves and breezes that bite. There’s a hint of something warm in the air too—baked bread of some kind. Maybe a pie or biscuits in the oven. Mazzy Star hums from my neighbor’s open window.

“This is the start of a very weird friendship.”

He’s so different from me. If I’m autumn, he’s spring. He’s all smiles and glowing warmth. His blue eyes are so deep, like the first beautiful clear sky of the season. He likes to rest them on my breeze-blown hair, drift them down to my painted lips or to the cardigan falling off my shoulder.

The world tilts. It suddenly feels like I’m falling through the ground, straight to the center of the earth. God, she’s breathtaking.

I guess you look at life a little differently after everything you thought was real suddenly isn’t. You embrace silly dreams a bit more.”

“I want you to be happy and—” His next words almost come out in a whisper. “Have you ever thought I might be happy with you?” I tense, taking in a shaky breath. “You can’t mean that.” “I almost wish I didn’t.” “But you said—” “I say so many things that I don’t know what comes out of my mouth half the time,” he says. “But you do…you make me happy. So, there. I’m stuck in my own damn head with thoughts of you that I can’t get rid of. So, what do I do? Huh? What do I do?”

And it hits me. I love this woman. I don’t know when it happened. It slipped over me so softly, like the changing of seasons. The seeping scent of baked bread first thing in the morning. A wistful sigh on a perfect fall day.

sometimes, life doesn’t always go the way you want, and it’s never ideal to abandon your previous life to pursue a new one. But sometimes, if you don’t, life isn’t a life anymore.

Michelle doesn’t put up with me. She chooses to be around me.