Never Always Sometimes

by Adi Alsaid

HOW JULIA HAD felt something so deeply for so long without knowing it herself was a mystery. As if love was a fugitive harboring in an attic, hidden even from the people residing in the house. Dave liked Gretchen? Well, Julia loved him. She loved him. If it didn’t hurt so much, she might have marveled at the way the mind/heart/psyche/whatever worked. How she’d known without a doubt that she was in love with Dave and had been for a very long time only when he told her he’d kissed someone else. How the words I love you had popped into her head so loud and so clear that she’d wondered if she’d really never said them before. How the realization seemed to unwind backward through time, suffusing every moment they’d had together with a love she’d simply failed to notice before. Of course she loved Dave. His humor, his—and she hated to even think the expression, but, trite as it was, it rang completely true—heart of gold, the selfless way he did everything he could for her. His sheepish smile. His hands, big and gentle. How had she loved his hands this entire time and not known it?