If He Had Been with Me

by Laura Nowlin

I love him. For all of my memory, I have loved him;

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.

Like most of my stories, it will end tragically.

“So what’s the meaning of life?”

“To be happy,”

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

“No, because sometimes sad things are beautiful,”

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.”

My heart stops. I am ten years old again, and I cannot imagine life without him.

know what I am feeling. I know that it is real, and in this moment, there is nothing else in me but this knowledge. I’m in love with Finny.

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.

I loved him the very first morning I stood at the bus stop with him and every night I sat across a dinner table from him.

There will always be something I cannot protect him from.

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.

We have created among ourselves something that is more powerful than any of us could hold separately.

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.

My breath shudders and my eyelids close against the pain of loving him. Finny. My Finny.