You Could Make This Place Beautiful

by Maggie Smith

“Wish for more pain,” a friend’s therapist once told her, “because that’s how you’ll change.” It has to hurt so much that you have to do something differently. The pain forces your hand.

“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”

I’ve never felt better. I’ve never felt worse. Your absence has made the life I have now possible. In which case, thank you. I didn’t ask for more pain, but I received it—you sent it—and it changed me. Thank you.

But the more time passed, the less I hurt. The less I hurt, the more I was able to see how beautiful, how full, my life was. I felt myself smiling as I walked in my neighborhood. My eyes followed the calls of birds to find them in the trees—grackles, woodpeckers, crows, robins, blue jays, cardinals. I’d built a life in which my days were like this: taking long walks, writing, mothering, cackling over coffee or cocktails with friends, sleeping alone some nights, being held close by someone I loved other nights. I was unfolding, learning to take up space. Life began to feel open enough, elastic enough, to contain whatever I might choose for it.