Reading Breaking Dawn: Chapter 39 (The Happily Ever After)

The song for this chapter is Inevitable by Anberlin

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And thus I have come to the final chapter of Breaking Dawn: the last book in the Twilight Saga. And what a journey it has been. My part in the Twilight fandom has been the most wonderful time of my life, and I say that with the deepest of sincerity. I have met more new friends in the past year than I have in my entire life. I have been to film premieres, bookstore events, midnight showings… all of these things that I never once expected to experience. This fandom has changed my life in immeasurable ways, some ways that I know I won’t even realize for a long time. I remember when I very nearly deleted this site the night I started it. How would my life be different if I had done that? The best memories I have were made with people I met through the Twilight fandom.

As for the ending of the Saga itself, it was just as sweet as I had hoped when I first picked it up: Bella and Edward are happy, as I think all of us have wanted them to be from the day both of them met in Twilight. Their happiness, I think, is just a reflection of how this book ends for everyone; but not only that, but it seems to tell of a strong, deeper ending to the entire Saga, and the lives of Bella and Edward.

In reflection of how this story ends, I like to think that there is someone out there for everyone: this one person who can make us complete, and with whom we are meant to be, and who we are, sometimes inadvertently and without fully realizing it, searching to find. I loved the Twilight Saga because I loved this concept — because I want to believe in it. A belief in fate or destiny aside, the idea that someone like Bella can go to a little town in the middle of nowhere and find someone like Edward seems to say that there is someone out there for each of us, somewhere, who might perhaps be searching for us right now, and who we could meet tomorrow, or a week from now, or next month.

It is easy to forget, after all of this, that Bella didn’t really like Forks when she first got there. She didn’t want to go to that school, or meet Edward, or be followed into the alley, or pretty much have anything to do with the rainy, miserable city of Forks. But if she hadn’t, she would have never met Edward. It seems to say that even the worst, most miserable times of our lives might perhaps be leading up to something extraordinary.

There is a depth of love that permeates the entire Twilight Saga, one that holds Edward and Bella together even through deaths, and wars, and heartbreak. I like to believe that the love each of us will eventually find will be just as strong as that, something that is so powerful that it can break down even the strongest boundaries, just as they did for Bella and Edward.

I think that what most of us want in life is this “happily ever after” in some form or another. Will we reach it one day? Have some of us already found it? Will we even know when we get there? As I have discovered with the Twilight Saga, it isn’t so much the ending that matters, but the journey we take to reach our own ‘small but perfect piece of forever’.

“But most significant in this tidal wave of happiness was the surest fact of all: I was with Edward. Forever.”

This post is short for a reason. Something more epic will be posted soon.