Page 125 of Happy After All

He must have been thinking the same thing.

“Good,” I say. “I’m so grateful for everyone. Maybe someday I’ll even be grateful Christopher came to help, I don’t know. I really thought I left devastation and destruction behind, in my old life, and then Rancho Encanto caught fire.” I look down at the ground and kick a pebble. “It’s a lesson, though, isn’t it? You can’t make yourself safe. Existence is risk. Caring is dangerous.”

“Very cheerful,” he says.

“I mean it in a cheering way. In the sense that I wanted to be safe. But I see now that isn’t possible. It’s clarifying. It makes me want to do more, find more, reach for more.”

“Like?”

Things I don’t want to say out loud just yet. But there is one thing.

“I have this ... itchy feeling,” I say. “Like suddenly there are more ideas. Like I want to write more. Does that make sense?”

He looks at me, a strange expression on his face. “Yes,” he says slowly. “What got you thinking about that?”

“Everything. Honestly. Everything. I don’t know what I want to write about exactly ... Everything I’ve been through, not like you. I think what you did is honestly so beautiful. You aren’t asking people to come to any trite conclusions. You aren’t saying anything trite. You’re just sharing her. I think that’s brilliant. I don’t have anything quite like that. But I feel like I have access to more parts of myself all of a sudden, and it makes me feel more creative.”

He nods slowly. “I get it.”

“It’s like I’ve been afraid. For a really long time. About what moving forward looks like. I don’t like ‘moving on’ as a phrase, I’ve decided.” I laugh. “At least I don’t like it right now. Though, maybe I will tomorrow. I’m still figuring this out.”

“Well, that I definitely understand.”

Both of us have old grief, but neither of us has been living like it was old. Him, because he needed to write about it. Me, because I refused to process it. I’m sitting here feeling absurdly happy, even with everything that has been going on the last few days. Even with the Christopher of it all looming before me. I sigh heavily as I tilt my face upward and watch as the sky starts to deepen from pink to purple.

“When you were a kid, what did you want to be?”

“A writer,” he says. “I used to wear glasses that didn’t have lenses in them because I thought it looked literary. My mom got me a typewriter from a yard sale that didn’t work.”

It makes me like his mom a little bit.

“I just liked books,” I say. “I thought that maybe I could just escape into one. I was in my head a lot. I pretended I was in stories because it made everything more bearable.”

“I’m kind of surprised you didn’t gravitate toward acting,” he says.

“Yeah,” I say. “I mean, I thought about it. When you’re an actor, I feel like people own so much of you. The right to comment on the way you talk, the way you look, and I just couldn’t handle it. I watched so many of my friends in LA audition, and I saw how brutal it could be. I saw with Christopher too, but make no mistake, it’s a lot more brutal when you’re a woman. I really gravitated toward creating the stories, not being in front of anyone or anything. I just, I don’t know—I like the part where I get to control the world.” I laugh. “Wow. That is ... telling.”

“I think it’s fair. For a couple of kids who got dropped into lives they didn’t connect with,” he says.

“Yes. True. We didn’t choose it. We had to be subject to the whims of our parents and all of that. God. No wonder we both wanted to make worlds we can control.”

“You know, I thought I could like the military, actually,” he says. “I could do what I was told, detached from everything. I liked the physical activity. I actually have conviction about ... what we did. I couldn’t write about it if I didn’t. There’s not enough hope out there sometimes. I know I don’t seem like someone who’s filled with a lot of it but ... at first I was. That’s why I write the books I do. I want to believe that the good guys can win. I want to believe that the good guys can actually be good, and not corrupt. I want to write about heroes who can overcome anything.”

“I think that’s why I like romance. You said it so beautifully at the dive-in movie when you said that it’s so much more work to find the hope. It is. I’m not saying I have found it perfectly in my own life, but I believe in it.”

He looks a little bit lost. “I want to. I ... I’d love to give you a romance between Tanner and Monica. I don’t know how to write that. Not right now. Because it feels ... I feel like an explosion might happen and she might die.”

“Nathan, you’re literally in charge of the book.” I almost laugh, but it’s not really funny. He’s being serious. That’s how terrifying love feels to him. Even in fiction, fiction he controls, it could all go wrong.

“I know. It doesn’t make sense.” He clasps his hands in front of him. “Life makes it really hard to hope for things.”

“That’s why happy endings are so hard,” I say. “But people don’t value it. They think it’s easy.”

We sit there, looking at each other, and I feel this desperation welling up between us. I feel the weight of it. “It’s not easy,” I say. “And it’s not ... trite, it’s not fluffy. I wish it was. The easy way out. The easy way out of what? What’s easy?”

“No fucking kidding.”

We sit for a long moment. “I think, even when everything was really dark, it had to be romance for me, because I needed to believe in something bigger than what I was experiencing. Better than what I experienced. I need to believe that somewhere out there in the world there were people who would take their trauma and overcome it. And I ...” I laugh. “I have been writing something I wasn’t doing. Over and over and over again. I was writing people who were digging deep inside themselves in order to be in love. It’s all a metaphor, right? It doesn’t have to be romance.” I sort of want it to be. “It can be anything in life. I was writing people doing things I couldn’t do myself. Healing is that damned hard.” I let silence settle between us for a breath. “It is really beautiful out here,” I say aggressively as the sky grows even darker and the stars begin to shine brightly.

---