One Day in December

by Josie Silver

He’s not film-star good-looking or classically perfect, but there is an air of preppy disheveledness and an earnest, “who me?” charm about him that captivates me. I can’t quite make out the color of his eyes from here. Green, I’d say, or blue maybe?

Sarah is my best friend in the entire world, and however much and for however long it kills me, I’ll never silently, secretly hold up signs to tell Jack O’Mara, without hope or agenda, that to me he is perfect, and that my wasted heart will always love him.

That’s the thing about flowers, isn’t it? They’re lush and extravagant and demand your attention, and you think they’re the most exquisite thing, but then in the shortest time they’re not very lovely at all. They wilt and they turn the water brown, and soon you can’t hold on to them any longer.

You tread lightly through life, but you leave deep footprints that are hard for other people to fill.”

And then he looks down at me, and his eyes say all the things he cannot. His gaze holds mine as we dance slowly, and I silently tell him that I’ll always carry him in my heart, and he silently tells me that in another place, another time, we’d have been pretty damn close to perfect.

The truth is that I’ve walked around the edge of being in love with Jack for too many years. It’s made me realize something inevitable, something that’s been a long time coming: he and I would be better off without each other. I need to unwind the roots of Jack O’Mara from my life. He’s too much a part of who I am, and me a part of him. The problem with uprooting things is that sometimes it kills them altogether, but that’s a risk I have to take. For the sake of my marriage; for the sake of all of us.

“Sometimes you just meet the right person at the wrong time,” I say softly. “Yeah,” he says. “And then you spend every day afterward wishing that time could be rearranged.”