Happy Place

It's basically a universal law that if one person looks for something for an extended period of time, then the next person to walk up to it will spot it immediately.

Being the object of his full focus makes me feel like a deer in headlights.

So we sat on the rug, our arms wrapped around her like we were a giant artichoke, her as our heart.

I retrieve my suitcase from the dinky airport’s baggage carousel and emerge through the front doors feeling like a woman in a tampon commercial: overjoyed, gorgeous, and impossibly comfortable—ready for any highly physical activity, including but not limited to bowling with friends or getting a piggyback ride from the unobtrusively handsome guy hired by central casting to play my boyfriend.

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.

Some passengers in the back burst into applause, and I yank out my earbuds, anxiety lifting off me like dandelion seeds.

"Oh, Harriet. Sabrina can't help it that she's most comfortable in Gucci."
Sabrina scoffs. "Don't be ridiculous. This is Chanel."

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.

When something beautiful breaks, the making of it still matters.

Love means constantly saying you’re sorry and then doing better

But the truth is, if I could take it all back, I would. I’d do anything to go back to that happy place, outside of time, where nothing from real life can touch us.

I need his mouth and hips to pin me in place, to anchor me in this moment, to slow time even further, like he always has, until this becomes my real life, and everything else – the shoebox apartment, the aching back and knees, the sweat pooling under my gown and mask, the night staring up at the ceiling that has nothing to say to me – is the memory.

I told myself I was too smart to think I was falling in love with him. Because I couldn't. I wouldn't.

If only I'd been right.

"I'm doing this for the sheer pleasure of annoying you."

It's not selfish to want to be happy.