If He Had Been with Me

by Laura Nowlin

For days, it felt like I had been punched in the stomach. It was like I couldn’t breathe, like something had been ripped from my abdomen. The feeling was so distinctive; it was different from any other kind of sadness I had known before or since.

And love the way it’s described in books and poems isn’t real; it’s immature to long for that, and it’s silly to think that with the right person it would be that. Jamie takes care of me and he loves me; in the real world, it can’t get better than that.

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.

I will sit here for a moment longer and be happy. 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.”

Isn’t this what all the children’s books and movies are always about? How even if the task seems impossible or you’re too small or you don’t have the right kind of whatever, you’re still supposed to try? Until you get to high school and suddenly you’re supposed to choose a safe path. A path that won’t take you too far from home. A path that isn’t too risky. A path that has health insurance and a 401(k).

I 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 was less enthusiastic about the fallen leaves; they meant that my enemy, winter, was drawing near. The bare trees made me think of death, and back then I had every reason to fear death.

Someday someone he loves will die.

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

I loved her, but I loved her differently from the way I’ve always loved you.”

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