If He Had Been with Me

by Laura Nowlin

They never stop; they never wonder if they already have it all.

I never tried to be weird, and I hated being seen that way. It was as if I had been born without the ability to understand if the things I was about to say or do were strange, so I was trapped into constantly being myself.

It was the sort of happiness that fools you into thinking that there is still so much more, maybe even enough to laugh forever.

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.

“Well, time always goes slower whenever you’re waiting for something,” he says.

Sometimes after this class, I worry that I talked too much, that I sounded like a know-it-all, yet the next class I can’t keep my hand out of the air again.

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.

I lay on my bed in late afternoon, watching a patch of light move across the floor, my throat tight, my body still. This is the saddest part of any day, when too much time has passed to create happiness while it is still light out. It’s too late. The daylight has been squandered on my immobility. The patch of light falls still; it begins to fade. It will be better when it is gone. This is only one day, I remind myself, and it is very nearly over.

I hate it when he convinces me to do things I don’t want to, and then I remember that I’ll be embarrassed later if I behave emotionally.

“That was a dream,” I say. “I have to accept reality.” Accept when things are as good as they’re ever going to get,

As I cross the threshold, I think how I don’t have as much time to decide as I once did. When I was a student here, anything in the world seemed possible. It hadn’t seemed like a dream to move far away and write books; it had seemed like a plan. At ten, I hadn’t thought wanting to be a writer was impractical; wanting to be a pirate princess was impractical, and I had put that dream aside.

When I let myself remember how we used to be, it is hard to believe things could change so quickly.

think we’re supposed to experience as much beauty as we can.” “Isn’t that the same as happiness too?” Jaime says. I shake my head. The grass pulls at my hair. “No, because sometimes sad things are beautiful,”

“Just because I think something different from you doesn’t make me weird.” “I bet if we took a survey, everybody would agree with me.” “That doesn’t make you right,”

“You just see things differently and that’s okay,

There is real life and then there are books. I try to puzzle out what is real and what isn’t, what I can have and what I never will.

The book is old and has that dusty, musty smell I love.

This book is a treasure; I did not suspect it would be so good when I picked it up, but now 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.”

Finny said that teaching seemed too normal for me. Isn’t this what all the children’s books and movies are always about? How even if the task seems impossible or you’re too small or you don’t have the right kind of whatever, you’re still supposed to try? Until you get to high school and suddenly you’re supposed to choose a safe path. A path that won’t take you too far from home. A path that isn’t too risky. A path that has health insurance and a 401(k).

I’ve loved him my whole life, and somewhere along the way, that love didn’t change but grew. It grew to fill the parts of me that I did not have when I was a child. It grew with every new longing in my body and desire in my heart until there was not a piece of me that did not love him. And when I look at him, there is no other feeling in me.

I love Jamie just as much as I always have. 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.

I used to say to myself that I just have to get through winter, that I just have to wait. That things would get better then. And I know that winter is supposed to end, but things are not always the way they are supposed to be.

I’m sure she could never imagine the rest of my mother’s life, the medication and the fights with my father, her times in the hospital. Sometimes I admire my mother’s ability to appear perfect; today I hate it.

“You think you deserve to be sad,” he says. There is a moment of silence as we look at each other. “You think it is okay for you to be sad every day. But it is not okay. And you do not deserve it.”

This is friendship, and it is love, but I already know what they have not learned yet; how dangerous friendship is, how damaging love can be.

I cannot imagine not wanting to live. I cannot imagine not believing that it will be better someday. I cannot imagine that there is nothing left to see, that there is nothing to tie me to Earth. As long as I want to live, then I must be fine.

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

As long as I can sleep, I feel numb, and numb is good; numb doesn’t hurt.

Death happens to him more suddenly than I can describe to you or even care to imagine.

Just because something seems impossible doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try.