You First

by J.C. Lillis

I feel exsanguinated, like I do after every awkward social encounter, so I put five cubes of fancy cheese on a plate and find a lime-green velvet armchair under a white plastic deer head.

I didn’t want to access the authentic me. The authentic me was a loser—a serial bungler of extracurriculars, a near-flunker of Super Saturday school—and I’d come to college specifically to shake him off like an ugly coat and put on someone better.

I cringed like I do when one of Ma’s friends sees us at the grocery store and yoo-hoos from three freezer cases over.

Chipmunks are some of the biggest pricks on the planet. You’d think it would be roaches, but most of them are wryly philosophical and charming. There’s a certain humor you cultivate when you’re universally despised and yet doomed to endure.

“Fear speaks loudest in solitude—don’t you think?”

the coolest album I probably owned was a David Bowie record my mother bought by accident after he sang “The Little Drummer Boy” with Bing Crosby.

She ended up having a breakdown and dropping out of school.” He kicked at a big stone lodged in the earth. “And apparently everyone acted like it was some tragic personal weakness on her part. Not because they expected so much from her.”

I’m good with whoever you are.

This is easy for him. He can shrug off his feelings, disappear into a moment. I never could. My feelings aren’t just on my sleeve, they’re on me head to toe, like full-body chainmail made of raw nerves.

This place is special and specific, the quiet garden that grew him and me into us.

He turned around and searched my face, eager for me to keep being the person he hoped I was.

He takes in a sharp breath and forces a long shivering exhale. “I don’t know why everyone expects me to do things I can’t do. I just want some peace.”

the frenetic classical-cardio workouts that don’t do a thing except make me wish I could unscrew my entire body like a light bulb and replace it with one that doesn’t hurt.

When we held out our newly ornamented hands, the faux-rings looked so sad and pathetic they begged for a story to save them.

I am Levon 2.0, now free to audition absurd wit and charm because I know you’ll laugh in a good way even if I get it wrong. I am a portrait of myself painted with your eyes, and when you see me as beautiful I almost believe it.

officially disbelieve in supernatural signs, but a desperate mind carves out odd footholds.

Some people call gulls the pigeons of the sea but that’s inaccurate, because pigeons take a near-scholarly interest in human foibles and seagulls just think we’re hilarious idiots that sometimes drop food.

I spend the afternoon walking around Summerhill, the town that loved me before Jay and will still love me if there has to be an after. I

I could buy a suitcase full of golf shorts and leave here with him in thirty days, but I’d spend the rest of my life missing. Missing here. Missing whoever I’m meant to become. Missing the things I’m going to do in the small town I love—things that someday, at the end of my life, will be assembled by my left-behind people into a eulogy my ghost will be proud of.

I can’t wait until this part is over, the lingering in limbo. If we can’t rewind, I want to fast forward. I want to exist in the safe future place where we find out who we’re going to be without each other, and whether those people can fit back together someday.