I Could Live Here Forever

by Hanna Halperin

The nice thing about writing was it took pain and warped it into something useful.

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.

The only thing I wanted was for my mother to be happy, and I did everything I could to make her happy. When she was happy, I felt loved.

I remember my mother as someone who was always searching for something. She seemed lost. Like she’d ended up in our house, in our family, by accident.

We didn’t know how to show each other pain. We didn’t know how to comfort one another. We were shadows; a shadow of a family. When

looked forward to love more than anything else about growing up. More than leaving home or learning to drive or doing drugs—things that other kids were excited about. I didn’t care about those things. The only thing I wanted was to be known completely by someone, to know someone completely.

Being in love made the heaviness go away. And being alone again after having been in love was even worse than the original loneliness.

After my mother, we all left, one after the other. There was no coming back after that. Home was a memory.

Conversations with Charlie were like smoke. They disappeared as quickly as they started.

I didn’t respond. It was a delusion. Everything he was saying. But that’s what this entire relationship had been. What was the point of being truthful about it now?

“A 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.