More Happy Than Not

by Adam Silvera

It’s easy to forget it’s there when it’s not glowing, until all of a sudden it comes back and surprises you; it reminds me of grief.

It sucks how a word that’s supposed to mean happiness can somehow feel warped.

“Maybe you look distressed or maybe I’m a mind reader, but I want you to know that nothing is different, Stretch. Sure, you do things differently and that’s okay. Nothing is changing,” Thomas says, and he wraps his arm around my shoulder as if this were ordinary. This is the guy who makes me happy.

He came home to kill himself. He came home to kill himself before I could bring a boy here. He came home to kill himself because of me.

This is one of those times where you swear you have to be sleeping and living a nightmare because it’s so impossible that your life can only be a string of bad things until you’re completely abandoned.

Every mistake I’ve made, every wrong I’ve repeated, every unhealed heartache: I feel it all and more as the weight of my old world crushes me. If you looked inside me, I bet you’d find two different hearts beating for two different people, like the sun and moon up at the same time, a terrible eclipse I’m the only witness to. My worlds collided and I can’t get up.

I’m always suffocating for what seems like an unfair amount of time, considering I never chose to commit the crime he hated me for. I never chose anything. I just was. I just am.

“There were a lot of reasons. But trying to live when my father refused to stay alive—because of who I am—broke me in a way I don’t think will ever be fixed.”

Memories: some can be sucker punching, others carry you forward; some stay with you forever, others you forget on your own. You can’t really know which ones you’ll survive if you don’t stay on the battlefield, bad times shooting at you like bullets. But if you’re lucky, you’ll have plenty of good times to shield you.

The problem was that I didn’t know any better because I forgot my life. And now I know I can’t forget. It won’t be an easy life, but I’ll soldier through. Thomas didn’t even know he was helping me with this—hell, I didn’t even know I would become myself again in need of this guidance. The boy with no direction taught me something unforgettable: happiness comes again if you let it.

Sometimes pain is so unmanageable that the idea of spending another day with it seems impossible. Other times pain acts as a compass to help you get through the messier tunnels of growing up. But the pain can only help you find happiness if you can remember it.

Without having forgotten I said it before, I keep repeating, “I love you in a non-weird way too. I love you in a non-weird way too. I love you in a non-weird way too . . .”

“We can’t ever be together,” he finished. “But I always want to know you, even if we’re in the same room and you’re just saying hi to me over and over again, I’ll be perfectly happy. I’ll always want to be sitting across from you.”

“I would do my damn best to be more happy than not.

If the blind can find joy in music, and the deaf can discover it with colors, I will do my best to always find the sun in the darkness because my life isn’t one sad ending—it’s a series of endless happy beginnings.

It’s storming outside right now. I stare out the window. I can’t tell you if it rained yesterday or even what day it is. It always feels like I’m waking up, minute after minute, like I’m in my own little time zone. But as I trace my smiling scar—unable to do so without remembering the time Thomas poked two eyes onto my wrist with dirt—I still have hope in what Evangeline and Leteo hope for, too. And while I wait, happiness exists where I can get it. In these notebooks, where worlds of memories greet me, almost like a childhood friend who moved away for years and finally came back home. I’m more happy than not. Don’t forget me.

While we can’t always engineer our own happy endings, we can learn how to be more happy than not with the cards we’ve been dealt.