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.

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.

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

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.

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 I spend more time trying not to think about him than actually thinking about anything.

From the loneliness, from the fear that I would never escape it. Because feelings were changeable, and people were unpredictable. You couldn’t hold on to them through the force of will.

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

I wish I could swallow the sound, that it would put down roots in my stomach and grow through me like a seed.

I feel like I’m finally there, that place I’ve always wanted to be, the other side of the lit kitchen windows I could see from my childhood street, where rooms are filled with love and noise and squabbling.

This hit home.

He was never yours to keep,

It still manages to hold traces of him. Or maybe that’s me, carrying his ghost around wherever I go.

When my body is humming with too much of something, or aching from too little, and life stretches out ahead of me like a threat.

“I thought being family just meant you have limitless time to hold grudges.”

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

Before I knew Wyn, I could have been okay without him. Now I’ll always feel the place he isn’t.

Want is a kind of thief. It’s a door in your heart, and once you know it’s there, you’ll spend your life longing for whatever’s behind it.

“it’s not home unless you’re there.”