Happy Place

by Emily Henry

The most important friendships in my life all came down to a decision made by strangers, chance.

Eventually, the silence would always crack, and we’d end up giggling giddily over texts from Cleo’s prospective new girlfriend, or outright shrieking as we hid behind our fingers from the slasher movie Sabrina had put on. We were loud. I’d never been loud before.

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.

What can you feel? Sunlight, everywhere. Not just on my bare shoulders or the crown of my head but inside me too, the irresistible warmth that comes only from being in the exact right place with the exact right people.

It’s psychosomatic, I’m sure, but suddenly I can smell it. I hear the echoey call of the circling gulls and feel the breeze riffle my hair.

I have to bite my bottom lip to keep myself from singing “Vacation” by the Go-Go’s

feeling like a woman in a tampon commercial: overjoyed, gorgeous, and impossibly comfortable—ready

We fall into that hyper-comfortable kind of silence, the quiet of two people who lived together for the better part of five years and still, after all this time, have a muscle memory for how to share space.

The kind of confidence reserved for those who skipped their awkward phases entirely.

And normally, I do my best to put people at ease, but there’s something rewarding about throwing him off-balance. Rewarding and charming.

my bones seem to fill up with helium.

how all day long my mind caught on him like a scar in a record.

I knew the only thing more painful than being without him would be being together knowing I no longer truly had him.

revealing a sliver of glow-in-the-dark smile. That snow globe feeling hits, where up is down and down is up and everything is either glitter or corn syrup.

Not that I’m looking at him. I can’t keep looking at him. But within hours of meeting Wyn Connor, it’s obvious he has his own gravity.

An ache starts behind my ribs. Like having this small bit of him has transformed all the pieces I can never have into a kind of phantom limb, a pain where there should be more Wyn.

I’ve noticed that he does that, talks himself down, self-deprecates, and he does it like it’s a joke he’s in on, but I think he might mean it, and I hate it.

He’s become my best friend the way the others did: bit by bit, sand passing through an hourglass so slowly, it’s impossible to pin down the moment it happens. When suddenly more of my heart belongs to him than doesn’t, and I know I’ll never get a single grain back. He’s a golden boy. I’m a girl whose life has been drawn in shades of gray. I try not to love him. I really try.

I don’t think she’s ever totally understood why I find it easier to fulfill other people’s expectations than to set my own.

know how quickly he scrubbed me out of his life; I don’t want to know how fast he got the shrapnel out of his heart.

He sends pictures of the new mystery releases during his shifts at Freeman’s to see if I want them.

When he stops by Trader Joe’s on his way home from work, he brings me cartons of ice cream, Maine blueberry or Vermont maple.

It always surprised me, how quickly the ratio of his face could change. In a second, he can go from that broody, tender look to almost boyish delight. Every time his expression changed, I used to think the new one was my favorite. Until it changed again and I had to accept that whichever Wyn was directly in front of me, that was the one I loved most.

I am in that phase of love where you’re sure no two people have ever felt this way before.

We. Hearing him say it is like biting into a Maine blueberry, the way you taste the salt water and the cold sky and the damp earth and the sun all at once. When we lands on my tongue, I see everything:

You are in all of my happiest places. You are where my mind goes when it needs to be soothed.

A happiness so bright and hot you feel like it could incinerate you.

It doesn’t matter how busy life’s been, how long the five of us have gone without seeing one another: meeting at the cottage is like pulling on a favorite sweatshirt, worn to perfection.

Our love is a place we can always come back to, and it will be waiting, the same as it ever was.

Not miserable. Just like it’s not enough. Like he and Mom both know there are other universes where they’re more, bigger, happier.

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.

When I’m terrified that all my happiest moments belong to the past.

Another little reminder of how well these people know me against all odds, all the pieces of me I’ve come to see as difficult or unpleasant, the parts I never voluntarily share but have sneaked out here and there across years.

the immense honor it is to hurt like she does. To have loved someone so much that the taste of maple syrup can make you cry and laugh at the same time.