Happy Place

by Emily Henry

My best friends taught me a new kind of quiet, the peaceful stillness of knowing one another so well you don’t need to fill the space. And a new kind of loud: noise as a celebration, as the overflow of joy at being alive, here, now.

Scut work, on the other hand, goes by in a flash. Most of my colleagues dread it, but I kind of like the mundanity. Even as a kid, cleaning, organizing, checking off little tasks on my self-made chore chart gave me a sense of peace and control.

#relatable

“Or maybe,” Cleo says, “in our other lives, we don’t have to figure out how to monetize anything. We can just be.”

“I love cleaning.”

“Cleo’s great at boundaries.

Whenever I get anxious, I clean, and it relaxes me.”

Same, girl, same.

My parents weren’t cruel, but they were strict, and they were tired.

I sat on the windowsill to read the first page and didn’t look up until I’d finished the book. Afterward, I went straight to the library for another. I probably read twenty cozy mysteries that summer.

I’m a sober introvert homebody,

OMG! I am Cleo :o

“There is nothing my parents drilled into me like good boundaries.”

When Cleo knows her mind, she knows her mind.

“If it’s for us,” Cleo says, “then you’ll respect my decision not to do something I’m uncomfortable with.”

“We have other things going on in our lives,” Cleo says. “We can’t always drop everything to relive the glory days with you.”

“There doesn’t need to be a winner and a loser. You just have to care how the other person feels. You have to care more about them than you do about being right.”

So many things could still go wrong.” I jog her by the elbows. “So many things could go right too.”

THIS.

Everything is changing. It has to. You can’t stop time. All you can do is point yourself in a direction and hope the wind will let you get there.

UR not responsible for Mom’s feelings. At least that’s what my therapist says. I just wanted to check in on you bc she’s convinced UR having some kind of breakdown. R U?

I should probably tell U I resented U, bc I thought U were just like them, and so they always liked U more. Now I’m realizing how much pressure U must’ve felt, and maybe if we’d acted like sisters sooner, things could have been different. So this might not mean all that much, but for what it’s worth, I’m proud of U. And Mom will def get over this, eventually. She got over my bellybutton ring.