The Conditions of Will

by Jessa Hastings

We do all these things to avoid the ephemeralness of ourselves and the people we form attachment bonds with around us, but there’s nothing any of us can do about it… One day I’ll die. One day you will.

Young and wise. It’s paradoxical.

He feels like the kind of memories I wish I had but don’t. He’s like déjà vu. And you know how when that happens, your brain is like, “Wait, we’ve been here before,” and you’re watching everything unfold and you’re waiting for the next thing to happen and you’re like, “I knew that,” and then the next thing happens and you’re like, “I knew that too,” and every time something happens that you’ve been waiting to happen because you feel like it’s already happened even though it hasn’t, you feel this floaty sense of delighted satisfaction—that’s what it feels like to be near Sam Penny.

With everyone else, I like their silence because it talks to me. I trust people’s silences more than their words. I can read the world in silence. But Sam is different. Silence with him is silence. Silence with him is five fifteen in the morning before the sun’s up and it’s still dark but the birds are singing. He’s the heavy quilt you pull over your head when it’s too cold and too early to wake up. He’s the song no parent ever loved me enough to sing. He’s the way water runs and bubbles over stones in a stream. He’s a quiet mind.

The great, deep stirring begins in the center of me, which some might call a longing, but I think of it more as an emptying. And it aches in my shoulders and my ribs because I know it won’t be filled tonight, and when he stops kissing me, which he eventually will because he has to because that’s how kisses work, it will tear me in two, because I think I’ve been waiting to know Sam Penny all my life.

There’s still time, Sam has said more than once. There is a beautiful optimism to him that isn’t born from sunny idealism or anything close to naivety, but rather a deep sense of hope that was forged in him as he climbed out of the flames of addiction.