What You Wish For

by Katherine Center

Joy seems pretty expendable.” But Max just smiled. “It’s one of the secrets to life that no one ever tells you. Joy cures everything.”

don’t think you can cure emotions,” I said. But Max just nodded. “Joy is an antidote to fear. To anger. To boredom. To sorrow.”

But what’s the opposite of an epiphany? A shrug?

I can’t explain it, but talking to him—about anything—just felt good. The way singing feels good. Or laughing. Or getting a massage. I’ve never been addicted to anything, but I suspect it might feel a little bit like this: You know you shouldn’t but you just want to so bad. That was conversation with Duncan: illicit, indefensible, and wrong, wrong, wrong—but also blissfully, hopelessly impossible to resist.

“This is going to change your life,” I said, turning it up a little. “Perfect,” he said, eyes still closed. “I always knew you’d do that.”

“Alice,” I said, “there was no math involved. Trust me. This comes from a lady who never finished learning her times tables.”

“Dude—I’m not happy because it comes easily to me. I bite and scratch and claw my way toward happiness every day.”

“It’s a deliberate kind of joy. It’s a conscious kind of joy. It’s joy on purpose.”

“I’m telling you. I know all about darkness. That’s why I am so hell-bent, every damn day, on looking for the light.”

She knew that joy and sorrow walked side by side. She knew that being alive meant risking one for the other.

“You said one time that you miss the guy I used to be. But I’m not that guy anymore. I can’t be him. I can’t know what I know now and be who I was then.

“You keep telling me not to live my life in fear. But I need you to understand that you don’t know what fear is.”

The world keeps hanging on to this idea that love is for the gullible. But nothing could be more wrong. Love is only for the brave.

“You think your dad left because you were too much. But what if your dad was too little?”

“Life doesn’t ever give you what you want just the way you want it. Life doesn’t ever make things easy. How dare you demand that happiness should be yours without any sacrifice—without any courage?

And while we can all agree that it’s good for boys—in theory—to have a father around, we also agree that it really depends quite a bit on the father.

We made a choice to do joy on purpose. Not in spite of life’s sorrows. But because of them.

We didn’t fix everything for each other—but we didn’t have to. We just made a choice to be there. Which counted for a lot.