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Why Did I Think You Were the One Who Would Make Me Happy?
Happiness should never be based on another person.
In my mother’s later years, she obsessed over her first love. She was curious about him and the trajectory of his life — even to the point that she enlisted my help to track him down on Facebook.
I still remember how her expression changed when we saw a picture of his daughter smiling at her high school graduation.
My mother went quiet, and I was too afraid to ask her what she was thinking.
After that night, we never talked about him again.
But I still remember that shroud of silence and the way she seemed to sink in on herself, any hope deflating from her form.
What I realized then was how she seemed to have hoped that he hadn’t moved on from her. Maybe she had expected a display of misery — or no traces of anything at all, perhaps the sign that not all was well in the man’s life.
But no. He was out there living. His happiness hadn’t depended on her. No matter how he felt after their break-up decades past, he had moved on from the heartbreak. My mother’s choice to end the relationship with him hadn’t been a paralyzing blow to his life.
