Happily Ever After

I'm not too ashamed to admit that I've always been a crier. Like the ugly-snotty-heaving-sobbing kind of crier who used to lock herself in her room and just wail about stuff when necessary. Throughout the years I've found there is no better cure to a troubled heart than a good cry. I don't even try to put up a front about it. I just roll with the punch. Or swim in the flood, however way you'd want to look at it.

Yet despite all my private theatrics, I also found myself to be surprisingly rebounding, a notion I came to understand as a 12-year -old girl sulking in her room because mom didn't let me go to one of my best friend's pool party. I swear I spent the entire day holed up in my room, not really caring anymore but still wanting to make my point. I'd never even truly missed out on anything, I didn't know what it was to truly lose out. 

During my senior year of high school I finally got a taste of what losing really felt like. I came back from school one day in December to find that my beautiful dog of eight years, my best friend, had gone missing. I remember spending the entire day riding my car around the neighborhood yelling her name only to come back empty-handed, and to remain empty-handed for all the years to come. I spent a solid three days afterwards alternating between blowing my nose and choking back tears. After that I was done, the dull ache a reminder of what I had lost, but the days ahead a possibility, a reminder that there was more. More to live, more to love. 

And let me tell you about that time I was truly ripped apart after reading the third book of the Divergent series. Sounds ridiculous, I know. Except that something you might not know about me is that when I read I'm not present in planet Earth anymore; I'm floating in the parallel universe where these stories might just be true. I'm a character myself waiting to unfold; rooting, seeking, hoping. And you might think it's funny, but I spent three days crying over this book. Like stupid depressed. The kind of depressed that didn't see a point in engaging in the regular activities of everyday life because I was just too hungover this damn book. Brushing my hair? Why, if the whole world is doomed anyway? / You mean, like, going out for a run? What for, if Tris didn't even get to friggin' LIVE!? And so two things got revealed to me this time. One: Apparently my rebound time is three days. That's all the time I need to process things and hold a little funeral for my emotions. Two: I just need a damn happy ending.

And one might argue, what is a happy ending anyway? What does it entail to wrap up a story where the characters are fulfilled, where justice is made, where you return to real life feeling hopeful rather than despondent? Whether it be because good won at last, or because love really did move mountains? But what if it didn't? What if  story resembled something closer to our life? Something sometimes cruel, sometimes crass, something real? 

I've spent some much time being afraid of a story confirming reality; of a book telling me that yes, people die, and that yes sometimes the girl doesn't get the guy, that families can be broken, that you need to do a lot of breaking before mending. And that no, you can't always have cake for breakfast. Sometimes in order to atone you can't get your heart's desire, because that's not what life's about anyway. It's not about what our selfish hearts want all the time. A life with integrity is also a life with sacrifices. It is one of the hardest things to stomach, and yet, one of the most liberating things I have yet come to understand. And I realized that my young self was never, and will never, be OK with the fact that we can't be impossibly happy. That every single thing we've dreamed up might just not come to be. My adult self looks at her and slowly shakes her head, thinking "How selfish". Sometimes happily ever after doesn't pertain to you exactly, sometimes it means a search for someone else's happiness besides our own. 

As I sat last week in my room finishing a book I had been devouring for the last two days, I knew I was going to be somewhat heart-broken before I got to the ending. Half-way through the book I thought "This is the kind of story that I will need reprieve from, I can just feel it coming". And yet I pummeled through, because I'm masochistic like that, and because I wanted to be freed. I wanted to play Josh Garrel's Beyond The Blue right after and hear him remind me:

"...to do the right thing even when it burns
And to live in the light through treacherous turns
A man is weak, but the spirit yearns
To keep on course from the bow to the stearn
And throw overboard every selfish concern
That tries to work for what can’t be earned
Sometimes the only way to return is to go,
Where the winds will take you

And to let go, of all, you cannot hold onto
For the hope, beyond,the blue…"

 I can't help but to think that there's something incredibly liberating about emotions. It's like opening a faucet in the dead of winter and letting it run to hot water; incredibly excruciating at first, then all-throughout comforting. And I sat there staring at a wall for the following 20 minutes, I felt my treacherous emotions do a one-eighty. I felt brave all over again. Because we're so human, we're so insignificant, our feelings so ephemeral, and yet, so enduring. Those emotions have the power to ignite change, to move mountains- to push us to love deeper, to climb farther. And we lose, and lose all the way, but we also win so much. At least, I need to believe so. After lying in the dump, the only way is up. And I need to believe that there's all this light we cannot see, that there's an order and a significance to how things come to be. 

"But what does it matter if I can't be with you" I wail. "I can't live without you."

"But you have," he smiles, though it is a sad smile. "You have and you will."

I nod bravely because it's true.

Life always keeps moving, even if it has to drag you along kicking and screaming.