Don't forget what happened to the man who suddenly got everything he ever wanted.

He lived happily ever after.

I am finding joy in a time of uncertainty. I am indescribably hopeful and optimistic about my future. And I am making friends with my sister.

“How was your day?” My mom asks, on the phone.

I am alone in my room with no one but a rabbit. I have just finished watching a movie I have seen forty or so times already. I am in a mood I cannot describe, in a situation I have never been in before. I am experiencing love and everything new with the inevitability of letting it go.

I am almost 22 and I cannot take anything very seriously. I laugh at things I should be upset about. My friends love the way I’m smiling while saying awful things. I sit on the floor and finish a bottle of peach wine with a girl I barely know. We talk and laugh until we physically cannot stay awake any longer. We hold hands while we joke about our shared misfortune.

“It was good,” I say.

“What did you do all day?”

“Nothing!”

By nothing, I don’t mean anything. I mean I didn’t do a single thing that would make my life easier the next day. I haven’t cleaned or done my laundry. I have not read the book or wrote the script or watched the movie I need to have done in a day. I walked to the book store and bought books I won’t even look at until summer, most likely. And summer—it seems so daunting. So exciting!! I will have time to read as many books and watch as many movies as I’d like. I could make as much pottery as I’d like. As much art as I can make. I could write a book, I could travel, I could drink wine with my sister. I am so afraid!

“We don’t really get to spend time together,” she says.

“We go on car rides and stuff.”

“Yeah, but, I don’t think we’ve ever spent this much time alone together,” my sister came to visit me at school last weekend. Coincidentally it was right when I needed her to be around. I have never thought to myself before that moment, as I walked in the dark to the bus stop in tears, that I just really really needed my sister right now. I cried as soon as we stepped into the hotel room. “I like that we’re getting to talk and hang out and stuff, we’ve never really talked… or hung out before.”

“You’ve never really seemed like you wanted to be my friend before,” I say.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I love you.”

In three short months I will leave behind everything and everyone I have loved for four years. I walked to the book store with an umbrella that my mother and I had bought together. I looked up at the tallest building in Oakland, the clouds just covered the top of it. I stared at it and thought, I will leave this place and never come back again.

I got a card from a pet food company that I had ordered rabbit treats from. The card was addressed: Dear Hawthorne Family, and I told my mother I had received some of her mail by mistake.

“I’ve never bought anything from there for the boys,” her dogs, “Why would it be addressed to us?” She says.

“It says ‘Hawthorne Family’ so I assumed it meant you guys. You’re the Hawthorne Family. Well, like, all of us are, you know?”

“No,” she says “They mean your family. You and Mabel.”

“Oh,” I say. “I guess we are a little family.”

The girls I spend my weekends with will move across the country, or across the sea. I will see them once a year at best if I can afford it. The girls I have sat on sofa’s with, cuddled up and eating rice together will be further away than I could ever imagine, when just the other day our arms were brushing together beneath a blanket to keep each other warm. The same girls that have kissed me on the cheek goodbye and hugged me and told me to get home safe. Girls that have told me they wished they had time we could spend together but can’t this weekend but maybe next weekend and I haven’t thought for a second that they’re avoiding me at all. The girls that write my name with little hearts and flowers around it on a box to make sure no one takes the sandwich I like and I don’t go hungry.

I will miss my time here like I have never missed anything before. In a different way than I have missed other things. I have never left something without leaving in spite, and I am scared of losing this little family that I have built. We have had such little time together. I don’t think we will ever be able to spend enough time together that I will be satisfied when saying goodbye.

My mom was driving me somewhere at some point and she was worried about money. In an attempt to comfort her I mention that at least she doesn’t need to worry about supporting me anymore, I do it by myself. At this, my mother starts to tear up.

“You don’t need us at all,” she says.

“Of course I do, why do you think I keep coming home. I like your food. I always need you to make it for me,” I say. She sort of smiles.

“But you could learn.”

“I probably won’t. I’m pretty lazy.”

“You will, you will.”

“Well, even if I did, it doesn’t matter,” I say. “Sometimes I just need my mama.”

I’m on the phone with my family now.

“Things are about to get very difficult for a lot of people,” My dad says. I am alone in my room. An empty wine bottle from the night before sits on top of my trash can. The room smells like hay, but stale and wet. I will have to change my rabbit’s litter box. We had passed out the night before and I never got a chance to clean it.

For a moment I am frightened beyond measure. I cling to this fear and I ask my dad a question. In that moment I am a little girl and I am clutching to his shirt with tiny fists. I am scared and I am asking my dad to please tell me that everything is going to be okay.

“What about me?”

And he says to me so many comforting words that I can’t begin to write them all down, but he finishes things with this:

“You are in the best spot that you can be.”

I texted my sister in the middle of the night once. It was maybe three in the morning and I asked her: Do you remember this quote? I can’t remember where it’s from.

“Don't forget what happened to the man who suddenly got everything he ever wanted. He lived happily ever after.”

Immediately she responds with the answer. It’s from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

“No, I don’t remember a man saying it. I think it was a woman. I can even remember the way she said it,” I say “I just can’t picture what it looks like.”

Months later I call my sister in the middle of the night. She answers me yet again, immediately. She had work early in the morning, she works an hour from home and wakes up at 6 in the morning.

“It’s from Clarence, from the ‘little buddy’ episode!” It was a show we all loved as children. “It was Miss Baker! She is the woman I was remembering!” She recognized the moment immediately. We laughed and went back to bed.

I have so many memories of being screamed at by my sister. She is the only person I’ve ever yelled at during an argument. We have always had a difficult time getting along.

“The only person I’d run through an airport for, is you.” Claire says that to her sister in Fleabag. It’s a good show. I think it’s about sisters.

My sister is the only person I would ever call in the middle of the night to talk to about cartoons. And I’m pretty sure she’s the only person who would answer the phone.

“It’s sort of sad,” I am sitting next to someone I’m sure now I will never speak to again. At this point I have come to understand that this is a goodbye and that I am being prepped for the real one that will come in a few days. “There are all these people that I’ve known and that I care about, that in just a few months, I won’t ever see again for the rest of my life.”

“Couldn’t you keep in touch?” I ask and we sort of laugh together at this because of how untrue we both know it to be.

I will miss even the worst moments of this place that I have loved for so many important years of my life.

“Maria.”

A friend of mine texts me to tell me that she cried because she had thought the snow just looked so beautiful. She was afraid that she felt things too much and too deeply.

“Yes,” I say.

“If I say I feel like I have a habit of ascribing too much meaning to things, do you get what I mean?” She asks. “Like nothing can just be what it is to me and it’s kind of ruining me. I can’t be neutral about anything.”

“Why is it ruining you?”

“Well I guess at least it’s really fueling my writing.”

“So it’s good then, if it fuels your writing. It’s better than nothing and having no writing.”

“Maybe it’s like an artist thing, I don’t know.”

“I think it’s sort of beautiful actually,” I say. “I was thinking about this the other day, because I was so sad that I just wished I could give up all of it, every emotion, even if it meant giving up joy. And then the next day was really sunny and I couldn’t stop smiling. I think I like it better that way.”

“JOY ALWAYS RETURNS. Life is so beautiful like that,” She says.

“Yeah it really does turn around pretty quick.”

It has been my dream to live in Brooklyn and be a writer and an artist and to be near friends. I have wanted this for so long that I can’t even pinpoint the exact moment I decided that this was where I was going to be one day.

As I write this, my rabbit jumps into my lap intermittently to demand attention form me. She steps on the keys of my laptop and so I close it and place it aside to give her as many forehead kisses as she will allow until she jumps off of my lap again.

This life, that I am living now, was once the life I had always wanted. I used to dream of what I would be doing right now and its pretty much exactly how I envisioned it would be. The rabbit was a bit of a surprise, but a good one. I was never given a concrete reason to hope so strongly, but I did, and things worked out.

And one day, I will find a job that I love and I will find an apartment that I love and I will decorate it how I like and I will cover it with thing’s I’ve made and things I’ve loved. I will have dinner parties with friends and we will share our lives together. I will come home on the train as often as I’d like. I will make breakfast for myself and the little family that I’ve made.

Soon, I think, I will get everything I’ve ever wanted.

Until I learn to want something new. And then I will get that too.

And then I will live happily ever after.

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