If He Had Been with Me

by Laura Nowlin

I know, I know, I know, I know. If he had been with me, everything would have been different.

In my memory of childhood, it is always summer first.

Winter is always a dead time for me. I wish I were like the trees. I wish I could feign death, or at least sleep through the winter.

I love him. 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.

This is only one day, I remind myself, and it is very nearly over.

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.

This year and then one more, and one more and one more.

“You think it is okay for you to be sad every day. But it is not okay. And you do not deserve it.”

“I love you,” she says. She always will.

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