The Light We Lost

by Jill Santopolo

You taught me to look for beauty. In darkness, in destruction, you always found light.

There’s something about death that makes people want to live.

“What makes a life well spent?” you asked. “That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” I told you, my mind turning as I was talking. “I think it might have something to do with making a mark—in a positive way. Leaving the world a little bit better than it was when you found it.”

THERE ARE MOMENTS that shift the trajectory of people’s lives.

Sometimes I got this feeling that we’d never be close enough. I wanted to climb inside your skin, inside your mind, so I could know all there was to know about you.

Do you still have it? Did you keep mementos like I did, objects to remind you of our life together? Or did you outgrow us as you traveled, tossing memories out with matchboxes and coffee mugs?

I tried to tone down my smile, tamp down the feeling inside me that said, All is right in the world.

Love does that. It makes you feel infinite and invincible, like the whole world is open to you, anything is achievable, and each day will be filled with wonder. Maybe it’s the act of opening yourself up, letting someone else in—or maybe it’s the act of caring so deeply about another person that it expands your heart.

I THINK I GLOWED THAT DAY. I LOVED A MAN WHO loved me back just as fiercely.

Sometimes I’ll walk by someone and catch that same scent, and it’ll throw me back to that day, even now. Has that ever happened to you? Have you ever been rocketed back in time by a scent that made you think of me?

“I need you to understand. I wish I didn’t want this—I wish I didn’t feel like this is the thing I have to do,

As much as I hated you just then, I still wanted to walk across the studio and slide in next to you on the couch, to feel the solidity of your body next to mine. You were my comfort and my pain all at once.

There were stores I couldn’t pass and restaurants I couldn’t eat in.

You were everywhere. We’d only been together for fourteen months, but it was fourteen months that changed my world.

I read that e-mail over a hundred times, maybe. It could have been two hundred. I analyzed every word. Every punctuation mark. I looked for the hidden meanings, any insight I could glean into how you were feeling or what you were thinking.

“I’d rather walk with you than run alone.

So much of what you’ve done, what you’ve asked of me—if I were a referee, if life were some sport, I’d stand up and shout, Foul! or Do-over! like we did when I was in summer camp. But there are no referees in real life, no true do-overs.

THERE ARE PEOPLE WE COME ACROSS DURING OUR LIVES who, after they drift out of our worlds, drift out for good. Even if we see them again, it’s a quick, meaningless hi and how are you? There are other people, though, with whom things pick up right where the relationship left off, whenever we run into them. The level of comfort—it feels like no time has passed.

I can’t tell if I just love Darren less. Or love him differently

“It’s just . . . it’s different,” I said. “And I’m worried that it won’t be enough. That what I feel for Gabe is just so monumental that nothing else will ever be enough.”

How happy you are factored in with whether losing that happiness is worth potentially finding more of it with someone else. I don’t know if I’m willing to take that risk. Like, what’s the threshold? If I’m eighty-five percent happy with Tom, do I risk it for the possibility of being ninety-five percent happy with someone else? And what’s the maximum happiness you can achieve with someone? I don’t think it’s a hundred percent.”

SOMETIMES A YEAR FEELS LIKE AN ETERNITY, BROKEN up into tiny capsules of time. Each chunk is so monumental that it seems like its own lifetime within a life.

Was I infatuated with you? Were we infatuated with each other? Can infatuation last this long? Or has it always been love between us?

Even married with a baby on the way, I was thinking about you. I was making life decisions based on us. But I truly thought it would stop—that you’d fade from my mind again, the way you had before. And that turned out to be more or less true. But at that point, you were still there, front of brain, guiding my thoughts.

It feels like I’m in Back to the Future and I’ve returned to a world that jumped ahead while I wasn’t looking.”

This shouldn’t make a difference to you, I told myself. You’re married, you have a child, you haven’t seen him in more than a year, he hasn’t been yours in more than four years. But it did. It made a difference. In that photograph I saw my “might have been.” I saw the road not taken.

If I’d never met you, maybe Darren would be enough. But I’ve taken a bite of the forbidden fruit. I’ve eaten from the tree of knowledge. I’ve seen how much more there is.

There is an element of peace in believing that we’re only players on a stage, acting out stories directed by someone else.

Page 254. That’s the farthest you’ll ever read in that book. You’ll never finish it. Your life was interrupted, cut short. A film that snapped on its reel and wouldn’t get to its natural end. There is so much you left undone. So much you’ll never complete, never see, never know.

You’ve shaped me. Did you know that?

The person I am, the choices I’ve made. They’re because of you.

I loved your father. It was a passion that transcended time, space, and all logic. I hope that you find a love like that—one that is all-consuming and powerful, that makes you feel like you’re going slightly mad. And if you do find that love, embrace it. Hold on to it. When you give yourself over to love like that, your heart will get bruised. It will get battered. But you will also feel invincible and infinite.

Now that he’s gone, I don’t know if I’ll ever feel that way again. If anyone else will make me feel as special or as chosen or as desired as he did. As seen. But I count myself lucky to have experienced those feelings at all. I count myself lucky to have met him.