Status Updates From Nosso final feliz

That’s the magic of stories.
They entertain you. They challenge you. They comfort you. They transport you to somewhere only you can find, and somewhere you can stay for as long as you like.

There is just something enchanting about meeting your favorite book, like locking eyes with a stranger across the room and knowing—immediately—that they are the other half of your soul. Books are magical that way, how they can hold small bits of you, written by people who never knew you existed.

And everything was good. Not perfect all the time, but real life was never meant to be perfect—where the burgers were always slightly burnt and the taffy was sticky and the weather predictable—but it was close.
Because this story was good, and it was sweet.
And it was home.

Love was patient and meticulous and it never ceased to surprise me. It wasn’t something that I needed, something that I deserved, that I was worthy of—love was what I wanted.

Love was a bunch of small things that added up to bigger things.
Love was feeling valued. And accepted.
Just the way you were.
It was never feeling too much, or not enough, even though often you were both, because Love loved you anyway. Not in spite of it, but because of it.

Love was inquisitive, and mindful, and—somewhere beneath the grumpy exterior—sweet. Love was tricking yourself into doing something you didn’t want to do, because you loved the person who did.

Love looked like a man who had coffee ready for me in the mornings even though he preferred tea, and remembered exactly how I took it. Love ate my sugary spaghetti, and held an umbrella over my head when it rained, and apologized when he knew he was wrong.

Art lived and breathed, like love, like friendship.
Life—like works of art—was transformative.
It persisted.
And through them, so did we.

Because even after the people were gone, there were still stories. There were always stories.

but that didn’t mean the story stopped. It wouldn’t, because we kept it alive—by reading her novels, by imagining what came next—and so because her work lived on, so did she. In little ways.
In little ways, she stayed.
Even as the story moved on.

And I knew Rachel was here, too. When she first died, I started to wonder what happened to the story she left behind.

“I know,” I agreed, and with my cheek against his, enjoying the smell of his aftershave and the warmth of his skin, and the way, when we danced, we seemed to breathe together, too, “and I think you’re worth the heartbreak.

I held on to him tighter. “I think,” I whispered, “I’m falling in love with you.”
To which he replied, not missing a single dance step, as if he already knew, “I’m not a book boyfriend, you know. I’m real.”

And he would never stop missing her, because that was what loss was in the end—breaking of a piece off yourself that you’d never get back. There were people who tried to fill that hole with work, and there were people like me who tried to fill it with stories; people filled it with whatever could fit.