If He Had Been with Me

by Laura Nowlin

She lies on the pavement, crumpled. Finny is untouched. He breathes heavily, and in shock and wonder, he stares out into the night. This is his moment of weightless suspension. His mind is blank. He feels nothing, he thinks nothing; he exists, perfect and unscathed. He does not even hear the rain. Stay. I whisper to him. Stay in the car. Stay in this moment. But, of course, he never does.

I love him the most when we fight and I am scared that he will leave me.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The love I’ve tried to hold back breaks its dam and flows over me, curling my toes and making fists of my hands as I breathe his name into my pillow. “Finny,” I say to the lonely dark. “Finny. My Finny.”

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

Finny, my Finny, kissed me. It was horrible. It was strange and wonderful. It felt like I was watching a meteor shower and did not know if it meant the stars were falling and the sky was breaking apart.

“Now,” she says, as we glide up the escalator toward evening apparel, “is all pink entirely banned?” “Not if it’s like a sassy pink,” I say. “But if it’s a sweet, girly pink, yes. Maybe some shade of sarcastic pink if it isn’t too abrasive.”

It hurts, but not like I thought it would. It isn’t a general blank pain; it’s contained and exact, just like being ripped apart. I can almost hear it.