If He Had Been with Me

by Laura Nowlin

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

For as long as I can remember, people have told me that I am pretty. This came from adults more often than other children. They said it to me when they met me; they whispered it to each other when they thought I could not hear. It became a fact I knew about myself, like my middle name was Rose or that I was left-handed: I was pretty.

Not that it did me any good. The adults all seemed to think it did, or at least should, but in childhood my prettiness gave more pleasure to the adults than it did me.

I am alternately demure and flirtatious.

It was the sort of happiness that fools you into thinking that there is still so much more,

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,

It seems that it isn’t always like that. Sometimes I know that I love Jamie, but I don’t feel it, and I wonder what it would be like to be with someone else.

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

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

Sometimes I wonder if having an illegitimate child and a string of lovers has kept Aunt Angelina young. Perhaps it has. Or maybe marriage has just aged my mother.

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.

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’m fine,” I say. I always am. Comparatively.

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.

Like all things that have become history, I now feel as if I always knew it, as if all through this story, it had been lurking in the shadows. The story underneath the story.

There just isn’t a way for two people on a bed to take off their jeans without being awkward and embarrassing.