When I Think of You

by Myah Ariel

On paper, I’m the receptionist. To the execs that call the shots, I’m “the front desk girl.” And to the directors, writers, and producers who churn through each day to pitch ideas and hawk scripts—I’m a greeting committee of one. And it gets old. What felt prestigious about this job to a once bright-eyed film school grad has slowly faded over the years. Yet here I sit with a forced smile on my face. Eyes forward. Shoulders back. Soul empty.

There are times in life when the hardest thing to hear is what most needs to be said.

this place is an invitation to settle back into the younger version of me that I took for granted.

All these years you thought Sam was the one, but turns out, he was just a stepping stone on the way to finding him. And now, all those special moments with the guy who will be your forever—the giddiness you feel after the first date, that electricity from your first kiss, those flirty texts the morning after you spend the night—it’s no longer in the past. The good stuff’s in front of you waiting to be experienced with the guy who is your actual person. Because with the right guy, none of it ends like this.”

“Because he’s your mirror,” I say. “You see him, and all your wants and desires reflect back at you. Then, when he inevitably falls short of your high expectations, it’s not just him you’re disappointed in, it’s also yourself, for misplacing all that hope.”

“But one conversation with you left me feeling like I’d lived my whole life just sniffing air, not really breathing it. Not like you. I wanted to be like that—I wanted to be with someone like that.

If I’m honest with myself, holding on to all that stuff after all this time feels like a choice. Like in doing so, I’m choosing to be weighed down. Now is as good an opportunity as ever to stop being a bag lady. Someone who hoards all her trauma and drama, packing it away in various bags for safekeeping. Carrying them along with her everywhere she goes so she can unfurl them from time to time, if only just to admire all her problems. It’s time to move on.

That’s the first flashback.” I pause and then demur, “I think.” “Don’t do that,” he says, somewhat forcefully. “Don’t do what?” I ask, caught off guard. “Don’t back off on how good you are at this by couching a completely perfect note with an I think,” he explains. “This is your wheelhouse, Kaliya. Own it.”

You take things as they are, and you make them better.”

“If love’s not a feeling, what is it?” I am quick with my reply. “Well, for starters, it’s a verb. You don’t just feel love, it’s a state of being. Like breathing. You don’t think about it, you just do it. When you’re in love with someone, it changes you.”

You know that feeling when a song comes on the radio that you haven’t heard in years, and instantly, it’s your favorite song all over again? That’s you. You have been my favorite song all over again

After all, an HEA might be guaranteed in a romance novel, but it’s a crapshoot in the streets.

All my firsts, I’ve given to Danny Prescott. My first date, first kiss, first I love you, and tragically, my first brush with real intimacy. With everything in me, I wish I could take them all back, especially the first that’s piercing a hole straight through me right now. My first heartbreak.

I don’t think I could speak for hours and when I finally did, I asked Danny to distract me. To tell me something good, anything that made him happy. “He told me about you,” she says, looking me in the eye. “This girl he’d met who’d dropped her suitcase in the street and then popped up in one of his classes. She had this sweet Southern drawl. He said that reminded him of me.” Minnie laughs and wipes at tears as they fall. “He was excited about this girl because she loved the same movies he did, movies no one else in his class gave the time of day.” She looks out the window at her boy, and a small smile brightens her face. “I asked him if he was planning on asking her out and he said he was working on it.” We laugh together, and for a moment, it eases the ache in my chest.

“There’s a reason I’m telling you this,” she says. “On all those calls, whenever I’d ask Danny to tell me about his life in the city, the conversation always found its way back to you—what you thought of the script he was working on for his thesis. Or a funny story you’d told him about your grandfather, or a debate the two of you were having about nineties rom-coms. And that’s when I realized, while he had been taking care of me, you were taking care of him. “You should never have had to do that,” she says, tearfully. “God, you both were so young, but especially you, Kaliya. I’ll always be grateful for the way you loved him.”

And when she says it so plainly like that, I know it’s still true. I loved him and I love him. I have since the day I met him.

“At some point I realized he’d stopped mentioning you altogether,” she recalls. “I’m ashamed I never asked him what happened between the two of you. I assumed things hadn’t ended well. But I dropped the ball in so many areas where Danny’s happiness was concerned and I never asked. I just hope you know he was in a world of pain. So whatever it is he might have done, with some exceptions of course, I hope he finds a way to make things right with you now. Because I haven’t seen him this far gone over anyone since.”

“You loved me?” Shamefully, it’s all I can come up with to ask. Danny stalks forward, crowding me in so close I have to tilt my neck to meet his eyes. “Love,” he says, lightly grazing his fingertips up my arms from my wrists to my shoulders, leaving chills in their tracks. “I love you, Kaliya. I never stopped.”

I feel now, with every fiber of my being, that for us to ever have a chance at being good together, first we have to heal.

“Loving you is like breathing for me, Danny,” I tell him, explaining it in the simplest way I know how to. “It’s undeniable and it’ll never stop.

“Do you think,” he speaks with a raw voice, “that maybe not now, but someday you could find a way to love me and stay?” The answer comes to me as steady as a heartbeat. I nod my head with an enthusiastic yes and the hope that springs from acknowledging the possibility of an easy-breathing kind of love with Danny sends a fresh wave of tears coursing down my cheeks. “When?” he asks, with a flicker of hope in his sad eyes. “When I don’t feel so lost in your world,” I say. “And when you’re not the center of mine.”

“Be the boss you’re meant to be. Then, go get the guy.”

It’s like he’s granting me permission to take this time and space to figure it out, assuring me that he’s not going anywhere while I do. Loving me from a distance. Like he said to me all those months ago in the mail room: All things come in due time.

now I know definitively that I can do hard things.

Soul-search for who I want to become—other than the girl who dreamed big but lived small.

Theirs was a life that love made beautiful.

“This morning, when I woke up, I felt like today would be different,” he says. “And not for the reasons you might assume with the movie opening and the festival and whatnot. I felt it would be different because I like to think that when you love someone fiercely, and with all your heart, the way that I love you—you don’t let days like this one pass without making sure they can feel it. And when I woke up, I felt it.”