When the Moon Was Ours

by Anna-Marie McLemore

Sometimes she tried settling into the memory, but she knew him so little he was not really hers.

Sam had disregarded that moment of thinking he’d seen a resemblance between Aracely and Miel. He’d let it fall like a stone he picked up, turned over, and then decided not to keep. But now he looked for it again, like brushing his fingers through a carpet of leaves, finding it a second time.

It’s here, and I’m bored. The words came back to him. Maybe why she once met him on the open land every night was that simple. He was here. She was bored. And now she wasn’t. But he was still stranded in this world that only half-belonged to him.

How there was no letting go of Samira, because now she felt like a friend he had imagined to fill the empty space before Miel. But he could not be her. There was still a part of him, spinning and wondering, that wanted to know how long his mother’s calm and patience would stand, how long until it fell or crumbled beneath everything he was. Would it hold if, one day, he drew closer to the faith of her father’s family, or her mother’s, both these faiths she’d rejected because she was so sure God was bigger than religion? Would it stay if, one day, he left this town to hang moons every place on earth there were trees, or if he never lived anywhere but this place his mother had given him? Would it stand no matter what he became or did not become? But for right now, that one sentence—What if I wanted to stay this way?—was all he had in him. He’d used up all his words.

Miel’s memory slid back over every time Aracely had opened her mouth, pausing before speaking, and Miel had braced so hard she felt it in her body. Each time, she’d thought Aracely was about to ask her questions that would land too hard for her to catch them. Each time, she’d hoped Aracely would say nothing. And each time, Aracely had.

That was the cruelest thing about losing someone. In being lost, they became so many different people, even more than when they were there.