If He Had Been with Me

by Laura Nowlin

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

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

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 tell myself relationships are hard work. No one is perfect. There’s no such thing as happily ever after.

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.

“Things aren’t always the way they’re supposed to be,”

I know that someday I will die, and I know that someday I will lose my virginity; these two things seem equally probable, equally impossible.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Finny. My Finny.

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

Finny’s lips were on mine.

Finny, my Finny, kissed me. It was horrible. It was strange and wonderful.

“I’m glad that you’re happy,” Finny says.

“You make me happier than any other person ever has,” I say, but he still won’t look at me. “Do I?” he says. I nod. “Every day,” I whisper.

“I love you,” Finny says

“Oh God, I love you.”

It begins to rain.

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