Before We Were Strangers

by Renee Carlino

Life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday. —KHALIL GIBRAN

Life was passing me by at high speed as I sat back with my feet up, rejecting change, ignoring the world, shrugging off anything that threatened to have meaning or relevance.

had come out of the field, where I had seen everything, and I went into a hole, where I saw nothing.

Nothing in this world made sense to me anymore.

I became acutely aware of everyone around me carrying on, living life. I was static, standing on the platform, watching train after train go by, wishing I knew which one to be on.

I wanted to get away from everything reminding me that I still had nothing.

“You’re chasing the wrong thing. It’s not gonna make you happy.”

I hoped that through the lens I would see her again, like I had years before. Her vibrant spirit; the way she could color a black-and-white photo with her magnetism alone.

I had thought about Grace often over the years. Something as simple as a smell, like sugared pancakes at night, or the sound of a cello in Grand Central or Washington Square Park on a warm day, could transport me right back to that year in college. The year I spent falling in love with her.

Time passes, life goes on, places change, people change.

It was as if the light were coming from her.

Something about her made me want to get to know her in every possible way.

In the short time I’d known her, I could tell that as savvy as she seemed about the world around her, there was a poignant fragility about her,

When the image began to appear, I realized right away that instead of looking into the camera lens, Grace was looking down at me, adoringly.

Without looking over, I grabbed her hand in mine and focused on the camera lens. As the timer sped up, I could sense that she was looking at me. Right at the last second, I looked at her. The shutter opened and I said, without moving my mouth, “Kee stil.” She giggled but continued staring up at me with wide eyes, watery from the wind. Three seconds doesn’t seem like a long time, but when you’re gazing into someone’s eyes, it’s long enough to make a silent promise.

When the shutter closed, she let out a huge breath and started laughing. “That felt like forever.” “Did it?” I said, still staring down at her. I could have looked at her like that all night.

I gestured for a hug. As she wrapped her arms around my waist, I kissed the top of her head and smelled her lilac hair. She pulled away and squinted. “Did you just kiss the top of my head?” “Just a friendly kiss. Like this.” I bent and kissed her cheek. She stood still, her eyes wide. “Goodnight, Gracie.” “Night, Matty,” she whispered as I walked back to my room.

It quickly became my favorite sight.

but we managed to see the city inside and out.

New York has an energy that takes root inside of you. Even a transplant like me gets to know the different boroughs, like they’re living, breathing organisms. There’s nowhere else like it. The city becomes a character in your life, a love you can’t take out of you.

The mysteriously human element about this place can make you fall in love and break your heart at the same time. When you hear her sound, when you breathe in her scent, you share it with all the people walking beside you on the street, in the subway, or gazing from a tall building across Central Park. You kn...

I think that’s why people in New York feel so connected to each other; the city harnesses this collective love and admiration. Grace and I ...

Our friendship had become so comfortable that brushing up against her, twirling her around, grabbing her hand, and giving her piggyback rides felt totally normal. Sometimes there would be quieter moments when it seemed like she wanted me to kiss her—and Lord knows I wanted to, but she would always break the silence or look away. I didn’t care, I just wanted to be around her.

all I could think about was how hard Grace worked, all the sacrifices she made just to play her music. She believed in it, she had faith that it would all be worth it, and what is faith if it doesn’t endure? That’s what I was learning from her: how to have faith in myself and my art. I felt it for Grace before I even had a name for it. I might have said the word a million times, but it sounded different now that I meant it. When I thought about what we had, it didn’t matter that it was just friendship. I loved her.

When it was just the two of us together, it was like everything was okay and we could be Grace and Matt.

Would I ever be able to stop thinking about how it felt to be wrapped up in him like that? Our bodies merged into one. Sleeping alone would never feel normal again.

The music travels through the instruments, but it comes from you, from your soul.”

“There’s music all around us, isn’t there?”

And then, suddenly, all of the muddled sounds became clear and merged together into the most beautiful symphony. The score to my life. Opening my eyes, I looked over and noticed that Orvin was watching me. “See what I mean? It’s within you.” My eyes were misty from the wind but more from the emotion. “Yes.” “You have to learn to fly before you can soar.”

Each day, I was learning how to simplify my life. Maybe that’s what growing up was really all about. Adults always say how complicated life gets as we age, but really, I think we just look for bigger challenges to overcome. Our biggest fears stretch from sleeping without our beloved teddy bear to finding out that we have no purpose in life. Did time, maturity, and overcoming obstacles offer the kind of contentment so evident in Orvin? Or did we just simply give up and surrender to the life we were already living?

Matt went to the corner and fidgeted with the dials on the rolling dryer while I wheeled around in one of the office chairs, propelling myself in circles, faster and faster. When he was done, he found another chair, pushed off, and came sailing at me across the linoleum floor. “Bumper cars!” he shouted, right before he knocked into me and sent us both falling to the ground. “Is this your definition of us talking?” I said as he hovered over me, a mischievous grin on his face. He leaned down, kissed the tip of my nose, and then popped up to his feet,

“Friends forever, though, right?” He studied my face carefully, and it looked as if he were cataloging the memory.

Friends forever might have been a tired expression, but when he asked, it was like music or poetry. I knew it meant something else. I knew it meant I need you in my life. I tried to detect some humor in his voice, but there was nothing . . . just a request. We stood there, so young and so sure about each other. The cold, dank room suddenly filled with light. Matt’s eyes twinkled and I felt dizzy as warmth spread from my head to my toes. His hands were open, reaching out to me, inviting me in for a hug, but I couldn’t move; I had been reduced to a puddle of emotions just from the look on his face.

You can’t re-create the first time you promise to love someone or the first time you feel loved by another. You cannot relive the sensation of fear, admiration, self-consciousness, passion, and desire all mixed into one because it never happens twice. You chase it like the first high for the rest of your life. It doesn’t mean you can’t love another or move on; it just means that the one spontaneous moment, the split second that you took the leap, when your heart was racing and your mind was muddled with What ifs?—that moment—will never happen the same way again. It will never feel as intense...

we’ll hang out. Just relax and be us.”

He lifted the dress over my head and then braced the back of my neck and kissed me like it was his only purpose in life.

“I love you,” he said

The echoes of his voice kept playing over and over in my mind as we moved together. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you too. Always. Forever.

“You’re my first muse, Grace.” The music Orvin had taught me how to hear was back. The sounds rushed through my ears as Matt bent and kissed me tenderly on the lips.

Aletha seemed like someone whose soul was so at peace, like life was no longer a mystery to her.

It was the first time I really thought about how fleeting it all is. Was this life? I wondered. You can spend hours upon hours engaged in meaningless, arbitrary bullshit, and then die while taking a dip in the river, your bloated body washing up onshore like discarded trash, only to be buried and forgotten?

Oh, fuck, we’re all gonna die, nobody knows when, nobody knows how, you think. And in that moment, you realize how little control you have over your own destiny. From the time you’re born, you have no control; you can’t choose your parents, and, unless you’re suicidal, you can’t choose your death. The only thing you can do is choose the person you love, be kind to others, and make your brutally short stint on earth as pleasant as possible.

“ ‘Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.’ ”

The present is our own. The right-this-second, the here-and-now, this moment before the next, is ours for the taking. It’s the only free gift the universe has to offer. The past doesn’t belong to us anymore, and the future is just a fantasy, never guaranteed. But the present is ours to own. The only way we can realize that fantasy is if we embrace the now.

I had been closed off for a long time, and I hadn’t allowed myself to imagine the future because I was still stuck in the past.

time is the currency of life. And I had lost so much of it. It was that idea of lost time that finally made me realize I needed to move on, that I would never have what I once had with Matt. I had to mourn our relationship and move on.

Two months ago I was walking around in a thick fog of regret. I was going through the motions but wasn’t feeling anything. I’d stare at my new wrinkles in the mirror and wonder where they came from. I wasted more time, repeating the same thing day in and day out, barely present in my own life. I wasn’t looking to break out of the cycle in search of anything meaningful. Until I saw Matt in the subway station. Everything changed. I could see in color again, every image vivid and crisp.

We both cried together, surrendering to the reality that we had to accept. No one could change the past or give us back the time we had lost, and there were no words to make everything better. We just had to accept the present for what it was.