If He Had Been with Me

by Laura Nowlin

In September people will tell you that their favorite season is autumn. They will not say this during any other month of the year. People forget September is actually a summer month.

was weird. 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.

Somehow we weren’t friends anymore. It wasn’t a choice. Not really.

I was a Pretty Girl, but I wasn’t a Popular Girl. I was different. I was strange.

a girl from St. John’s who wears a crucifix and a skull on the same chain.

With my new friends, being weird is a good thing, as long as it’s the same weird as them.

I was a misfit who had found other misfits to fit with.

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

you can feel more than one way about a person.

Eventually the conversation turns to sex, as I am learning all conversations eventually will.

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.

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.

it’s impossible to say and even harder to feel.

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.

“Things aren’t always the way they’re supposed to be,”

“Are you sure you still would want to if you were sober?” I say. Finny nods. “Yeah,” he says again. “But I’m only telling you because I’m not.”

if that greeting-card commercial with the old lady comes on, you’ll tear up,”

sometimes sad things are beautiful,”

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.”