Heaven Adjacent

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

I don’t care about that stuff anymore. Whether I’m looked upon as wise or not. I don’t need to be right at this point in my life. I don’t care what other people choose to do. I just know what I want to do now.”

It’s more or less what I came out here to try to answer. Why do we do work we hate all our lives? Somewhere earlier on the road somebody must have made us feel that we didn’t have an option to do otherwise.

You can put any kind of judgment you want on the way you feel, but that won’t make it go away. Unfortunately you can’t insult your feelings out of existence. Trust me.

When had she begun making bargains with life to avoid extra trouble, and, with it, any joy whatsoever?

She could do anything it came into her head to do, no matter how utterly it defied the rules she had lived by all her life.

She was wearing no makeup. She could directly rub her eye. She placed the pad of one index finger on her eye and ran it back and forth, hard, until the itch was satisfied.

Now I think heaven is more like . . . like just what you need to live a decent life.

“You worked for me for eleven years and I didn’t know if you had a car or not.”

She spent her whole life working for something she never lived long enough to enjoy. If she were here right now with full benefit of hindsight . . . being able to factor in her sudden death . . . well, I have to believe she’d tell me not to make the same mistake.

There’s a reason people will always let you down. It’s because they came to this weird planet to live their own lives. Not anybody else’s. Classic case of needs in conflict. You get what I’m saying?”

People come into our lives, she thought, and it’s not always a forever kind of thing, and not always meant to be. Not every deal is for keeps.

Roseanna realized, just in that moment, that living in her new home was all about feeling exposed—feeling the sun and the wind and the cold. And living in the city was about being insulated. And she had lived in the city all her life.

Once you’re in a new environment your mind goes blank. Like a clean slate. That helps us be ready for any challenges in the new place.

Every time Patty added a piece of trash to a pile, Willa dragged it away again and added it to her arrangement.

I have. That’s the thing. I came to my senses and that’s why I left.”

We don’t really talk about private things like that. Do we? I didn’t think we did.” “But we’re best friends.”

Being private people is not the worst thing in the world.

And Roseanna would have liked that. Very much. She would have treasured such an opportunity, in fact, had it ever come to pass.

“I’m starting to see that we make choices at an early age,” Roseanna continued, “when we’re too young to know what will make us happy. But they’re more or less permanent choices. They don’t have to be, I guess. But somehow we end up thinking they have to be. It’s hard to make a change after so many years, and we don’t want to let people down by breaking our promises.

“We’re all going to die,” Nelson said, leaning forward over his knees and staring down the end of his fishing pole. “So it doesn’t pay to go through life fearing death. Mind you, I realize as I say so . . . it’s one of those things that says easy and does hard.”

‘Bad news. You only have a year to live.’ That person’s life changes completely in that moment. All of a sudden they realize they’re about to be out of time. They start thinking about how they want to live while they still can.”

Why do we live like we’re not going to die?”

“It’s just so boring. How do you make all this time go by?” “You adjust,” she said. “You get over that urge to check your phone every couple of seconds. It’s a mind-set, and you break it. Sometimes I get more bored than usual. So I get up and do something. Cook something, or

“You’re trying to have it both ways,”

But then you say she’d want you to fight the lawsuit. If she were here, and saw her mistake, how do you know she wouldn’t tell you to forget Jerry and the money and just enjoy your life? Death either changed her or it didn’t.”

And it’s not so much that I didn’t agree, or that I didn’t see your point. It was more that I refused to look.

All big changes are scary. And it’s

in a private heaven there’s no one to have a sudden coronary and be rushed to the hospital. Yet somehow that didn’t strike her as a good enough argument. Life always held some surprise that made you wish you had two strong arms and a solid chest for support.

guess I meant I don’t know him as well as I should. I could’ve taken more time to get to know these people. So long as I’m letting them stay.” “Not in your nature,”

“I’ve been acting like heaven is a place with no people in it, so there’ll be no one to bother me. Like that’s what’s really important in life—no minor irritations. But then there’s no one to delight me, either. And what did it take to force me to figure that out—that’s what bothers me the most.

so now it seems perfectly reasonable to think heaven on earth is probably a place with shrieking children and running dogs and a horse who eats the rubber blades off your windshield wipers.

“Why would they do that?” “Because you helped them.” Roseanna began the process of letting that sink in. Allowing the warmth of it to fill her gut. Letting herself actually believe such a thing could be true.

Yes, indeed, that is my pattern, and then continue to do it that way all the same. No. Sooner or later you had to get up off your sorry butt and do a little better for yourself.

decided she could. Because she just would.