If He Had Been with Me

by Laura Nowlin

Sometimes I am disappointed with love. I thought that when you were in love, it would always be right there, staring you in the face, reminding you every moment that you love this person. It seems that it isn’t always like that.

For all of my memory, I have loved him; I do not even notice it anymore. I feel what I have always felt when I look at him, and I have never before asked myself what it is exactly. I love him in a way I cannot define, as if my love were an organ within my body that I could not live without yet could not pick out of an anatomy book.

The gray world out there looks inviting, velvety and cool.

This must be what alcohol does to people; it makes them forget all the carefully drawn lines in the world.

I can feel the printed words seeping through my skin and into my veins, rushing to my heart and marking it forever. I want to savor this wonder, this happening of loving a book and reading it for the first time, because the first time is always the best, and I will never read this book for the first time ever again.

“Try to marry your first love. For the rest of your life, no one will ever treat you as well.”

My love for Finny is buried like a stillborn child; it is just as cherished and just as real, but nothing will ever come of it. I imagine it wrapped up in lace, tucked away in a quiet corner of my heart. It will stay there for the rest of my life, and when I die, it will die with me.

And I know that winter is supposed to end, but things are not always the way they are supposed to be.

Perhaps he would ask me what books mean to me. I would tell him that it means living another life;