Page 146 of Go Luck Yourself
I do not text him.
He texted. To apologize, again, and again, but there’s been nothing since that first week.
Siobhán texted me too, apologizing on his behalf and wanting to still be friends and maybe I will, someday, but all I could do was text her that I’m fine.
I click off my phone and let it drop onto my chest.
If I close my eyes, it is like no time has passed. I could be back in my flat at Cambridge, trying to find the gumption to go to a class I hate, dreading every moment of every day coming at me.
And that familiarity is what finally slaps me upside the head.
The harrowing, achingsamenessof slogging through my existence when I know now what it’s like to bemeagain. It might’ve turned out to be a mess, but—within that mess, within those lies, I found parts of myself, didn’t I?
I toss my phone on the coffee table and shove up from the couch, standing in the middle of the room, chest aching.
I don’t want to feel like this again.
I don’t want to be this person again.
But what do I do? I’ve gone into a state of detachment since I left Ireland because it hurts, but mainly I don’t trust myself to react. I’ve thought I wanted so many different things—a happy ending with Iris, my mom to come back,Loch—but they were allwrongfor so many different reasons, so what now?
My mind trips, crashes to its knees over one word.
Ending.
Coal asked me something a while back.In all that writing you used to do about happily ever after, did you ever think through what being happy would actually feel like?
It sure as hell isn’tthis.Miserable and on edge, like I’ve lost something, and every room I go into, I look around on instinct, expecting to see it—him—and I—
I slap my hands over my face and breathe into the hollow of my palms.
What does being happy feel like?
Not the ending.
Theafter.
What did I think I’d feel like after I got all those things I once wanted?
A barrage of words comes at me: content. Whole. Safe. Fulfilled.
It feels like lying on a bed under morning light and his sleepy weight on my chest.
It feels like my back cramping from bending over a coffee table, fingers spasming as I write and write and write.
I lower my hands, and my eyes snag on my desk across the room. I forgot to grab the notebook I’d filled when I left Ireland in a hurry, but my school shit is scattered from where I dumped it when I got back before Ireland, and I spot my laptop bag, right on top.
Why do I have to wait for an ending to give me those feelings?
Why can’t I have any of that shitnow?
I walk towards the desk on unstable legs, scramble through the clutter until I clear a space and ease out my laptop. I open it and popit on and as it whirs to life, my breathing ramps faster, but something inside me settles.
I’ve been so obsessed with various endings giving me closure or happiness that I’ve neglected the journey to get to any of them. Like putting words into a story, word by word.
Why do the words that make the journey matter less than the words that make the ending?
I’ve spent so much time placing value on the end over anything else that I’ve missed so much going on around me. I’ve lost so many parts of me that I could have been enjoying rather than worrying how stupid mistakes would screw up some undefined future.
