I Could Live Here Forever

by Hanna Halperin

I’d always thought of quiet as synonymous with steady. Partly because that’s what I’d always been. Leah: tall, quiet, predictable. I had emotions, though. Big, torrential emotions. But that was why I read. That was why I wrote. I wasn’t one to call attention to myself in real life.

The nice thing about writing was it took pain and warped it into something useful. I could shape it into a beginning and a middle and an end. It was manageable that way. And it was mine. Sharp and beautiful. By the time I was done with it, it was just a story.

I didn’t need to be the prettiest or the most successful or even the most talented. But I desperately wanted—needed—to be loved.

It seemed important, before I told the others about my meeting, that I wash away this evidence of my hope. It was my vanity, more than anything else, that humiliated me.

There are certain memories I’d never write down or tell anyone. I know what happens when you write things down. They change shape. Some of the feeling goes away. Things on the page are never as rich as they are in your head, as they were in real life. There are parts of my mother I could never bear to lose.

Being saved from sadness and saving someone from sadness—these weren’t just things I yearned for out of the blue. It was something I’d been born into. I didn’t know how to separate the feeling of love from the feeling of wanting to escape.

It seemed arbitrary, the families we were born into. Some things we couldn’t change: the parents we had, the childhoods we’d lived. Was it possible to change the way we were in a room?

relationship isn’t supposed to make you happy. You find happiness on your own. A partner is there to support you and build with you. It seems as though you’re looking for some magic person who’s going to solve all your problems, but you have to do that yourself. What we have together is complicated, but it’s good and real.”