If He Had Been with Me

by Laura Nowlin

Midnight. I am as excited for the kiss with Jamie as

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.

There’s no such thing as happily ever after.

I love you, Jamie’s note says. You are the best thing that ever happened to me. All I want from life is to marry you and have our family. Have a good summer. With me.

“Are you going to leave me?” I ask. Swiftly, Jamie moves closer to me and pulls me into a hug. “I will never, ever, never leave you,” he says. “I love you too,” I finally say.

I think about how certain he is that those years together will come. Our age doesn’t matter to him. He never fears that we aren’t meant to be together. He never doubts us; he never doubts anything.

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.

“Because everyone always says that you never get over your first love. She loved Mr. Rochester first, and she loved him so much. Even if she fell in love again, I think part of her would always be wishing she was still with him.”

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 tre...

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.

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;

“Why should I have to pretend that I don’t know I’m pretty when everybody’s telling me all the time?”