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.

“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.

Maybe we spend years in one reality, then jump to another where only one tiny thing is different. Like a certain reality show used a trapdoor to eliminate contestants. And there are infinite universes, where everything that ever could happen has and will.”

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

so I'm just chopped liver.

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

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

I miss Wyn from the other room. I miss our apartment with its hissing radiator and its friendly book-moving ghost. I miss sitting on the rocks in Maine, shivering in the cold with Cleo’s arms wrapped around me, both of us bundled up in old Mattingly sweatshirts while Parth and Sabrina argue over the best way to make a s’more.

“I’ve spent my whole life trying to make it up to them.”

it’s not your fault.

“I will always love you,” he says fiercely. “That’s the point, Harriet. It’s the only thing that’s ever come naturally to me. The thing I don’t have to work at. I loved you all the way across the fucking country, and at my darkest, on my worst days, I still love you more than I’ve ever loved anything else.

“Spent like seventeen years operating on fifty-five percent lung capacity without realizing breathing just wasn’t supposed to be that hard. Starting antidepressants was like that for me. I felt like shit all the time, and then suddenly I didn’t. And all this stuff seemed possible for the first time. My mind felt … quieter, maybe. Lighter.”

now that the grief isn’t strangling me, there’s all this extra room to love you.

“I am,” he says. “I am still yours.”

How can I exorcise all this trapped, combustible love in one day? How can I stockpile pieces of him in the next twenty-four hours and then let him go, like he needs? Like he deserves.

And I know this place, even if I can’t name it. I know that I’m safe, that I belong.

“I don’t need you to stay the same, Cleo,” I say. “And it’s not ‘having things in common’ that makes me love you.

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.

I become a body, a sequence of organs and veins and muscles working in concert.

“There was nothing bigger than you,” he says raggedly. “Not to me. Not ever.”

“I mean that you have the weirdest laugh of anyone I’ve ever met, Harriet,” he says softly. “And it feels like taking a shot of tequila every time I hear it. Like I could get drunk on the sound of you. Or hungover when I go too long without you. “You see the best in everyone, and you make the people you love feel like even their flaws are worth appreciating. You love learning. You love sharing what you learn. You try to be fair, to see things from other people’s points of view, and sometimes that makes it hard for you to see them from your own, but you have one. And even when you’re mad at me, I want to be close to you. None of it—none of my favorite things about you, none of what makes you you—has anything to do with a job. That’s not why I love you. It’s not why anyone loves you.”

Like even when something beautiful breaks, the making of it still matters.

This is how I used to think of love. As something so delicate it couldn’t be caught without being snuffed out. Now I know better. I know the flame may gutter and flare with the wind, but it will always be there.

They belong to you in every universe we’re in, Harriet.”

“I love you,” I tell him. “In every universe.” He kisses me then, a windblown curl caught between our lips. Like it’s a first and a last. The end of one era and the beginning of another.

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.

And I know, if nothing else, I’ll have that. I know I’ve chosen the right universe.