If He Had Been with Me

by Laura Nowlin

Now that I’ve actually been to high school, I have no desire to be one of those girls with the ponytails and the pleated skirts. I am thrilled to finally be allowed to be myself, even if it is still under certain confines. With my new friends, being weird is a good thing, as long as it’s the same weird as them.

"iM nOt LiKe OtHeR gIrLs"

I wish I were like the trees. I wish I could feign death, or at least sleep through the winter.

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 the most when we fight and I am scared that he will leave me. After we fight, I want so much to be close to him, and the next day I want his hand in mine every minute.

oof run girl

he wants me to pay attention to him, but I wish he would leave me alone so that I could go back to reading

ok this one’s kinda relatable 🤣

I’ve found it’s just easier to let him have his way on all the little things that shouldn’t matter.

again run

I’m more proud when the others laugh at his jokes than I would be if they were my own. He’s handsome and funny and mine.

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.

“Are you sure you still would want to if you were sober?” I say. Finny nods. “Yeah,” he says again. “But I’m only telling you because I’m not.”

i understand

the idea that love could be so impermanent scares me.

“In a good mood?” she says. I nod. “It’s the first day of summer and I’ve already killed someone off,” I say.

“So what’s the meaning of life?” Angie says. “To be happy,” Jamie says immediately. “Really?” Noah says. “I was thinking it was to do good or something.” “And I was thinking it was to have orgasms,” Alex says. There is a sound that I assume is Sasha hitting him. “Isn’t that the same as being happy?”

“Just because I think something different from you doesn’t make me weird.” “I bet if we took a survey, everybody would agree with me.” “That doesn’t make you right,”

I add up again all of the things that I want from life. There is real life and then there are books. I try to puzzle out what is real and what isn’t, what I can have and what I never will.

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.

My mind is already tabulating all the possibilities; 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.

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.

“All these people are really weird.” My mother covers her mouth and laughs silently. “Honey,” she whispers, “what did you expect? And what do you think they would say about the girl with the tiara and ripped knee socks?”

NO FR. GET HER, MOM!

“Everything is going to be fine,” she says. I know that. Everything is fine already. It’s always fine. Everything is fine, fine, fine.

I think of my fantasy home where the furniture—tables, chairs, and bed frames—are all piles of books.

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

“Why didn’t you call me?” “I did. You didn’t answer.”

As long as I can sleep, I feel numb, and numb is good; numb doesn’t hurt.

you’re the ideal I’ve judged every other girl by my whole life,”