If He Had Been with Me

by Laura Nowlin

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.

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.

His face flushes pink, and—before I can remember that I shouldn’t feel this—I am thinking he is beautiful.

Part of me wants to close my eyes and focus on the scent; another part just wants to keep looking at him.

This is the saddest part of any day, when too much time has passed to create happiness while it is still light out.

I grab hot chunks of the potatoes and lick my fingers.

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

I am a virgin, and I cannot drive.

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.

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;

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