If He Had Been with Me

by Laura Nowlin

By the time the leaves and weather do begin to change in late October, they have tired of autumn and are thinking of Christmas. They never stop; they never wonder if they already have it all.

During Job Week in fifth grade, I told the class and teacher that my career goal was to move to New York, wear black turtlenecks, and sit in coffee shops all day, thinking deep thoughts and making up stories in my head.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

I needed this; for the past few weeks, I’ve had this melancholy following me around. I’m happy today, and I think that maybe things will be better now.

And I know that winter is supposed to end, but things are not always the way they are supposed to be.

“You think you deserve to be sad,” he says. There is a moment of silence as we look at each other. “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.

“You okay?” “I’m fine,” I say. I always am. Comparatively.

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

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

My penis, based on very minimal evidence, has decided that today is going to be the greatest day of both our lives. I understand its enthusiasm, but it’s (sadly) vastly overestimating the situation.