If He Had Been with Me

by Laura Nowlin

If he had been with me, everything would have been different.

He was sweet and shy and everyone liked him.

I was a Pretty Girl, but I wasn’t a Popular Girl.

He is undeniably gorgeous.

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. Sometimes I know that I love Jamie, but I don’t feel it,

I love him the most when we fight and I am scared that he will leave me.

Sometimes he loves me more than I love him, and he wants me to pay attention to him,

Sometimes we both love each other a lot and it’s hard to hang up at night, and I wish it could always be like that.

Jamie tells me that he will always love me and take care of me, no matter what. He says it over and over and over and over again.

He looks so handsome that I get butterflies in my stomach looking at him.

There’s no such thing as happily ever after.

The last day of school feels as if it is truly the last, as if I am being set free not for three months but thirty years.

It is summer and we are free.

“Well, time always goes slower whenever you’re waiting for something,”

I thought separation from him would be the worst thing that could happen to me. I lay awake at night wondering how I could survive without him.

The thought of enduring every day without him took away my sense of self, of balance, of hope.

He’s handsome and funny and mine.

certain he is that those years together will come. Our age doesn’t matter to him. He never fears that we aren’t meant to be together. He never doubts us; he never doubts anything.

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.

A spike of ice impales me through the middle. I can’t breathe around the spike; it’s too large. The cold spreads from my stomach into my lungs and heart, but it does not numb the pain.

“Because everyone always says that you never get over your first love.

Even if she fell in love again, I think part of her would always be wishing she was still with him.”

I find tears over physical pain so embarrassing.

He says I’m perfect. He says I’m all he wants. I can’t disappoint him.

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 will marry my first love. It will only be the first time once.

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.

He is the better one of the two of us;

Perhaps he is relieved to not have me holding him back anymore.

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.

“Love is complex,”

I love my friends.

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

I don’t remember always being the brave one. I remember being afraid that he would leave me someday. I never would have left him.

Someday I’ll be happy like that, I tell myself.

It’s possible to love two people at once, but could it be possible to stay loyal to one?

I’m proud that unlike other boys, he isn’t so focused on sex that he can’t think of other things.

I never thought I could be free of his love for me.

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

“I thought if I broke up with him, no one else would ever love me like that.”

don’t feel numb anymore, and it’s not a good thing. My stomach hurts and my chest has a familiar ache.

“It’s like I need him to help me get over him.”

with him; I’m safe from hurting myself.

don’t want to watch him fall for another girl. I want him to be in love with me.