You and Me on Vacation

by Emily Henry

ON VACATION, YOU can be anyone you want. Like a good book or an incredible outfit, being on vacation transports you into another version of yourself.

That crush of happiness, that feeling that this is what life’s about: being somewhere beautiful, with someone you love.

I’m crying because I’m relieved. Because I will never again feel as alone as I did during those long nights as a kid. As long as I have him, I will never be alone again.

You asked me who I was, and—it was like the answer came out of nowhere. Sometimes it feels like I didn’t even exist before that. Like you invented me.”

And here it comes, the moment that keeps slipping through my fingers, like it’s the game-changing detail in an instant replay I can’t seem to pause or slow down. We are just looking at each other. There are no hard edges to grab hold of, no distinct markers on this moment’s beginning or end, nothing to separate it from the millions just like it. But this, this is the moment I first think it. I am in love with you. The thought is terrifying, probably not even true. A dangerous idea to entertain. I release my hold on it, watch it slip away. But there are points in the center of my palms that burn, scorched, proof I once held it there.

“Because I know you,” he says tenderly, “and I remember what you sound like when you like something.”

But I was just some other woman, whose needs he’d always put first to the detriment of his own wants and happiness. And this week, I’d stumbled into this selfishly, because that was my default with him. To ask for what I wanted, to let him give it to me even if it wasn’t necessarily the best thing for him.

“It’s not your job to make me happy, okay? You can’t make anyone happy. I’m happy just because you exist, and that’s as much of my happiness as you have control over.”

Maybe things can always get better between people who want to do a good job loving each other. Maybe that’s all it takes.

it would be humiliating to admit that I feel exactly like that incapable, lost, melancholy stereotype of a millennial that the world is so fond of raging against.

Suddenly we’re not kids anymore, and it feels like it happened overnight, so fast I didn’t have time to notice, to let go of everything that used to matter so much, to see that the old wounds that once felt like gut-level lacerations have faded to small white scars, mixed in among the stretch marks and sunspots and little divots where time has grazed against my body.

You can’t outrun yourself. Not your history, not your fears, not the parts of yourself you’re worried are wrong.

“But most of us are too scared to even ask what we want, in case we can’t have it. Read that in this essay about something called ‘millennial ennui.’”

“You’re not a vacation, and you’re not the answer to my career crisis, but when I’m in a crisis or I’m sick or I’m sad, you’re the only thing I want. And when I’m happy, you make me so much happier. I still have a lot to figure out, but the one thing I know is, wherever you are, that’s where I belong. I’ll never belong anywhere like I belong with you. No matter what I’m feeling, I want you next to me. You’re home to me, Alex. And I think I’m that for you too.”

Tomorrow we will love each other a little more, and the next day, and the next day. And even on those days when one or both of us is having a hard time, we’ll be here, where we are completely known, completely accepted, by the person whose every side we love wholeheartedly. I’m here with all the versions of him I’ve met over twelve years of vacations, and even if the point of life isn’t just being happy, right now, I am. Down to the bones.