You Know Me Well

by Nina LaCour

“You’re never going to be ready,” Lehna says, her voice warming somewhat. “Don’t you see that? You have to forget about ready. If you don’t, you’re always going to run away.”

I thought it was the end of the world, but it wasn’t. I thought it was the start of the world, but it wasn’t.

I am not good with quick decision making. I’m much better at obsessing for so long over a decision that the answer becomes irrelevant.

“I always wonder what it would be like to meet him now, as a stranger,” I find myself saying. “This is my game within our game—to try to come up with the scenario in which it would work out better. Maybe if I met him now. Maybe if I met him in college. After college. Once he’s comfortable with who he is. But every time I do this, I feel awful. Because I’m sacrificing our history. I don’t love him for who he is now. I wouldn’t love him for who he is two years from now. I love him for all the hims he’s already been with me. I guess that’s the contradiction. I want a fresh start. I would fight for that fresh start. But I also want it to be a continuation.”

“What’s happening to us—the decisions we’re making and not making, the things we can control and the things that we can’t—they are huge. And people can choose to forget how it was for them, or they can remember. They can half-listen to us and roll their eyes when we leave because we’re young and we have no fucking clue what we’re doing. Or they can actually listen, and they can think about themselves when they were like us, and maybe we can bring some pieces of them back.” And now my eyes are welling up, my hands are trembling. “Because we lose it,” I say. “We grow up and we lose ourselves.

I’m ready to lose myself, but I’m not ready to lose you. I’m ready to find myself, But I’m not ready for you to know what I find.

what I realize is that somehow, without even knowing it, I have stepped out of love with him, and where I’ve stepped instead may end up being the better place. I have to step out of love with him, because the ground I’ve always wanted to be there was never really there. He is capable of giving that ground, but I am not the one he wants to give it to. Instead I have the ground we’ve grown all these years.

I am alone, yes. But I am a part of this. I am a part of everything. I feel it—I’ve been living in a world, but what I have is a universe.

“Let’s know each other like this for a very long time.”