Happy Place

by Emily Henry

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

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. I couldn’t have imagined being any happier, loving anywhere else as much.

Think of your happy place, the cool voice in my ear instructs. Picture it. Glimmering blue washes across the backs of my eyes. How does it smell? Wet rock, brine, butter sizzling in a deep fryer, and a spritz of lemon on the tip of my tongue. What do you hear? Laughter, the slap of water against the bluffs, the hiss of the tide drawing back over sand and stone. 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.

Ordinarily, I would consider myself to be a superb seatmate. I’m more likely to get a bladder infection than to ask a person to get up so I can use the lavatory. Ordinarily, I don’t even wake someone up if they’re asleep on my shoulder, drooling down my chest.

I narrow my eyes. “Aren’t lawyers supposed to be good at lying?” “Objection!” she says. “Speculative.”

I’m tired of trying to be smart at the expense of my own happiness.

The point is, some people live the bulk of their lives in their minds (me), and some are highly physical beings (Wyn).

I was more scared of marrying someone who couldn’t bring himself to leave me or to keep loving me. It was why I hadn’t let myself cry when Wyn dumped me, or ask for answers or a second chance. I knew the only thing more painful than being without him would be being together knowing I no longer truly had him.

within hours of meeting Wyn Connor, it’s obvious he has his own gravity.

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 want to know that you’re happy too.” Now it’s my turn to stare at him in disbelief. He still wants absolution. And what can I say? That I’m not happy? That I’ve tried dating someone else and it was the emotional equivalent of bingeing on saltines when all I wanted was a real meal? Or that there are whole parts of the city I avoid because they remind me of those first few months in California, when he still lived with me. That when I wake up too early to my screaming alarm, I still reach toward his side of the bed, like if I can hold on to him for a minute, it won’t be so hard to make it through another grueling day at the hospital, in a never-ending series of grueling days. That I still wake from dreams of his head between my thighs, and reach for my phone whenever something particularly ridiculous happens in the cozy mystery I’m reading, only to remember I can’t tell him. That I spend more time trying not to think about him than actually thinking about anything. All that heady nostalgia and sweltering lust has become combustible, erupting into anger.

“Is there one that looks like us?” he asks. They all do, I think. You are in all of my happiest places. You are where my mind goes when it needs to be soothed.

His love is steady, constant. Easier than breathing, because breathing is something you can overthink, to the point that you forget how your lungs work and get yourself into a panic. I could never forget how to love Wyn.

“No,” he says quietly. “In every universe, it’s you for me. Even if it’s not me for you.”

Time doesn’t move the same way when we’re there. Things change, but we stretch and grow and make room for one another. Our love is a place we can always come back to, and it will be waiting, the same as it ever was. You belong here.