Afterwards (Editing)

Chapter Fifteen

After that blow I miss Henry more and more. I want nothing more than to have my brother by my side, the brother I love so much. Before I go to sleep I talk to him, asking him to come visit me again, to come comfort me. I spent time replaying before he left, pretending that was now.

Dane decides I can't live in the apartment building anymore, and so does Erik. I move in with him and we sell Mrs. Kilder's car. He drives me to work with him. Dane keeps going to high school, I keep working, Erik and I grow more and more in love, and every night I wish for my brother to come visit me and then I write. 

Erik is really quite amazing. I think we might end up married one day. he understands my family broke when my brother died and he just tries to comfort me when I have episodes of mass sadness, he listens to me tell him about my brother and Mrs. Kilder and he tells me about his family, his alcoholic father, his dead mother. Sometimes we read each other our stories.

I'll tell you what happened a year later, we did get married, Dane went to college and then joined the Air Force upon promising me he won't die but he loves to work with the planes, inside the planes. And one night Henry did visit me again. He told me that he was happy I was happy, that that was all he wanted, and he was okay where he was. He said he was happy that he hadn't seen through the war.

Five more years later I had a child, Dane got married although he was still serving, and everything was fine, and I came to the understanding that honestly, Henry is happier he didn't live, and Mrs. Kilder is probably happier too. They were okay, and I published a book, and I had two characters. One was named Dustin and one was named Violet, and it is about how they met and how they grew old together, and then how Dustin died of old age and how Violet was sad, and she had a young neighbor who was totally lost in the world and that young neighbor had a friend who loved tinkering with machines. When Vioelt did finally die the young neighbor realized that her brother and Violet were happy wherever they were, and her friend who liked tinkering with machines became really happy because he made that his job, and they  lived happy ever after. It sold, it really did, and people asked me how I came up with the idea, if it was based off of my life, and I told them that similar things had happened to me, but really quite honestly, I think the story sums up something that everyone gets summed up at some point, so the story is based off of everyone, it just so happens that I intwined the story with my own experiences.

Erik wrote a novel too. His was about a young girl and how she grows up, and it's also about a young boy and how he grows up, and it is quite good. The boy and the girl meet and they end up together, and people asked him how he came up with it and he had the same answer. I came up with it from watching people my whole life, he said, and this is something they all learn, it just so happens that I have tied in my own experiences.

And like his book says in the end, when everyone around them is finally happy and they are happy, they indeed lived happy ever after, even with the past strapped to their backs, but they met someone who cared about them, and the people they cared about were happy, even if happiness mean peace six feet under.