If He Had Been with Me

by Laura Nowlin

Stay in this moment.

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

What binds our group together is the shared statement that we are different

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.

Real.

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

The thought of enduring every day without him took away my sense of self, of balance, of hope.

And 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.

Im in love

It’s the way I love Finny.

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

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

“Because everyone always says that you never get over your first love.

Even if she fell in love again, I think part of her would always be wishing she was still with him.”

“I think we’re supposed to experience as much beauty as we can.”

“No, because sometimes sad things are beautiful,”

Like how people leave, or how people break other people's hearts, or broken promises

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.”

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.

And I know that winter is supposed to end, but things are not always the way they are supposed to be.

Over, around, and through us, we are a force, woven, tied, and bundled together. If in the future we separate, it will look so simple on the outside, a falling away, a slipping of ties. And on the inside, we will be ripped and shredded, torn as the bonds that hold us are pulled away.

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.

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

At moments like this, it amazes me that the words don’t come tumbling out of me. I can feel them in my mouth like three smooth pebbles. I can feel them there when I swallow and when I breathe.

“Finny?” I say. There is silence. “Oh, Autumn,” my mother says.

If he had been with me, Finny would still be alive. If he had been with me, everything would have been different. But whose fault is it that he wasn’t?

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