If He Had Been with Me

by Laura Nowlin

For as long as I can remember, people have told me that I am pretty.

It was understood by everyone that I belonged to Finny and that we belonged together.

With my new friends, being weird is a good thing, as long as it’s the same weird as them.

“Oh, she likes her, but I think she’s never gotten over the disappointment that you and Finny didn’t end up together.”

I imagine Finny loving Sylvie, but sometimes wishing she were different, the way I sometimes wish Jamie were different.

I’m more proud when the others laugh at his jokes than I would be if they were my own.

I promise myself that no matter what it is, he will believe that I love it.

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

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.

Though I am dying to look down again and read more, I’ll sit here and love this book and know that I still have so much more left to read because that won’t be true for very long.

“Try to marry your first love. For the rest of your life, no one will ever treat you as well.”

I’m the sort of person who tries to figure out the end of the book as she reads it and my conversations are no different.

As I brush my hair, I think with some worry of Jamie driving in the snow, until I remember that it is a sunny autumn day; it was only snowing inside my book.

“You think it is okay for you to be sad every day. But it is not okay. And you do not deserve it.”

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;

If he had been with me, Finny would still be alive.

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

Just because something seems impossible doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try.