Braelyn Wilson's Blog: Braelyn Wilson's World

IF HE HAD BEEN WITH ME BY LAURA NOWLIN

After finishing this novel and trying to conceptualize all of its components, I have picked a few notable things that stood out to me, as a hopeless romantic, as an author who writes tragic endings, and as a girl who finds the beauty in sadness.

There is beauty in sadness, and that is something the author is trying to push for us to realize. There is beauty in something ending, because while it occurred, it was beautiful, and it was meaningful—it meant something. We are urged to learn that things do not need to matter and exist forever, for them to have existed at all and have made a profound impact. We are urged to look at the bigger picture, which, we can learn through this story, the bigger picture doesn’t always have to be the bigger picture in retrospect, or through a physical ideal. The bigger picture can be the smallest element that plays the most crucial role. The bigger picture of this story is, that happiness does not equal beauty. Sadness does not equal beauty. All things can be beautiful—you just have to find what is beautiful within them. Death is sad, but death is real, and reality and truth and unconcealed oblivion… that is beautiful. That is something beautiful to me, at the very least.

Autumn has loved Finny her whole life, she has not known a life without him. And though their friendship withers and fades with time and—not lack of love but—lack of nourishment to give it the ability to weather the storms, their love is something that will be cherished through time, and into forever, for whatever forever may be. Finny dies at the end of the story, and Autumn is hurting. So much so that she tries to end her life. But she is also brought the gift of life. She is brought the gift of a child made from love and brutality and honesty and hardships. And though her best friend and love of her life may be gone and death hurts and the life she once knew will never go on, there is a new life. There is a new light, shining bright, at the end of her once hopeless tunnel. She has a new chance at life, at revival. At starting fresh and now holding this lesson near and true to her heart: if you love someone, you say it. You don’t hold it back. You don’t try to make sense of it, because love doesn’t have to be sensical. You don’t try to wait for the right time. You don’t say it because you don’t think they feel it back. You say it, and you say it loud. You say it bravely, with your bare chest exposed to the world. And she never did that with Finny, until it was too late. But she has the chance to do it, with, though, not him, his child, his love, and his heart. She has the chance to do what she was meant to do all along. Everything will happen as it’s meant to.

I have never lacked perspective, in the sense of not being able to make sense of why they didn’t confess their love early on, why they didn’t become friends through high school when it was clear they should’ve been, why the author made Finny die at the end. I do not question the author's choices of writing this story, because it is real and true and these things happen in our day to day world. But I do think, through this story, we should learn to live everyday as it is and as best as we can, and to love in every second of it. We should be unabashed and unashamed in ourselves (like Autumn, wearing tiaras all through high school), in what we stand for (like Autumn choosing to not lose her virginity just because all of her friends were doing it, and because it was the right thing to do), and what and who we love (like Finny and Autumn’s love for each other, even when others couldn’t understand it).