Loved One

by Aisha Muharrar

But—you may be thinking—there’s always a chance to make things better. Even if it gets really bad, if you’re truly good friends, then you can work it out. And absolutely, totally you can. Unless, three weeks later, one of you dies.

Right before turning thirty, I’d felt acutely aware that I’d reached the end of something. Not just my twenties, but also that feeling that life was completely fresh, newly unfolding. Experience and routine were settling in.

I’d been convincing myself that Gabe and I had made some mistakes, we’d ended up in an awkward place, but eventually who we were would have remained the same. But if he had taken off his bracelet, it was more than that. Discarding the bracelet was discarding us, making the last month more serious than one isolated incident.

And, either way, if the bracelet was out there, I wanted it back. As a souvenir of our time together, as a personal token of the earnest art student who I used to be, as proof that at one point when Gabe gave me his word, he meant it.

I can’t pinpoint for sure when things unraveled. It was the kind of relationship where in the aftermath you don’t even consider yourself single, you’re just recovering.

But that night was more. Much more than when we were two kids fumbling around for a summer. The more was the friendship. The more was knowing we would have each other even as the people we dated passed through our lives. We were lucky the way we were. In other words, it would have been perfect if it snowed that night. But it didn’t and it was perfect anyway.

I’m sure I needed to hear something from them too, but I wasn’t sure what that was.

Since I’d heard about Gabe, I’d been dealing with a paradox. I didn’t want to be alone. I didn’t want to be around other people. There was some kind of impossible divide between me and the world.

I think everything had come easy to him so far, and when it was time to put in real work, he didn’t know how to do it. He had no idea how to motivate himself and it terrified him.