We Are Okay

by Nina LaCour

Maybe the story came from some part of me that wished I knew more, or at least had actual memories instead of feelings that may have only been inventions.

I’m just afraid that one day something’s going to catch me by surprise. Stale coffee. Squares of American cheese. Hard tomatoes, so unripe they’re white in the center. The most innocent things can call back the most terrible.

I must have shut grief out. Found it in books. Cried over fiction instead of the truth. The truth was unconfined, unadorned. There was no poetic language to it, no yellow butterflies, no epic floods. There wasn’t a town trapped underwater or generations of men with the same name destined to repeat the same mistakes. The truth was vast enough to drown in.

We were miraculous. We were beach creatures. We had treasures in our pockets and each other on our skin.

But sometimes two people have a deep connection. It makes romance seem trivial. It isn’t about anything carnal. It’s about souls. About the deepest part of who you are as a person.”

I could say the night felt magical, but that would be embellishment. That would be romanticization. What it actually felt like was life.

We were innocent enough to think that our lives were what we thought they were, that if we pieced all of the facts about ourselves together they’d form an image that made sense—that looked like us when we looked in the mirror, that looked like our living rooms and our kitchens and the people who raised us—instead of revealing all the things we didn’t know.

In her face something is shifting. A set of facts to replace all the guessing I made her do.

But I know that there’s a difference between how I used to understand things and how I do now. I used to cry over a story and then close the book, and it all would be over. Now everything resonates, sticks like a splinter, festers.

And then I say it again, because I told myself lies for so long, and now my body is still and my breath is steady and I feel alive with the truth.

I close my eyes, and I breathe her in, and I think about this home that belongs to neither of us, and I listen to the fire crackling, and I feel the warmth of the room and of her body, and we are okay. We are okay.

I don’t know if I still love her in the way that I used to, but I still find her just as beautiful.

I listened to the same heartbroken song the entire bus ride home, because it was still a summer when sadness was beautiful.

Was he? I thought he never lied to me. I thought I knew who he was, but he was a stranger all along, and how do I mourn a stranger? And if the person I loved wasn’t even a person, then how can he be dead? This is what happens when I let myself think too much.

Our bodies are the same but there’s a heaviness in Mabel’s shoulders, a weariness in the way my hip leans against the counter. A puffiness around her eyes, a darkness under mine. But more than those things, there’s the separateness of us.

“Sometimes it’s difficult,” he says, “to know the right thing to do.”

I AM AFRAID he never loved me.

I was okay just a moment ago. I will learn how to be okay again.

Even if there was someone, how could I keep telling myself that I’m fine with so little, that all I need is Hannah’s friendship and the pool and scientific facts and my yellow bowls and a borrowed pair of winter boots, if I spoke a girl’s name aloud? She’d become something I wished for.

Here we are on Ocean Beach. Here’s the whiskey bottle in the sand and the sound of waves crashing and the cold wind and the darkness and Mabel’s smile against my collarbone. Here we are in that spectacular summer. We are different people now, yes, but those girls were magic.

It’s a dark place, not knowing. It’s difficult to surrender to. But I guess it’s where we live most of the time. I guess it’s where we all live, so maybe it doesn’t have to be so lonely. Maybe I can settle into it, cozy up to it, make a home inside uncertainty.

Each someday and each kiss. Each specific kind of heartbreak. The whole world was out there, but I was in my mother’s arms, and I didn’t know it yet.