If He Had Been with Me

by Laura Nowlin

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

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.

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

I’ve tried to pretend I don’t, but I can’t pretend anymore. 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.

“Were you and Finny jumping in the leaves?” Mom asks when I slide into the back seat. I look over myself to see if I’m still covered in leaves. “No,” I say. When I close the door, the lights shut off, and I see what she must have seen—back in the shadows, someone tall and lean is pulling himself up out of the leaves and dusting himself off.

Over, around, and through us, we are a force, woven, tied, and bundled together. If in the future we separate, it will look so simple on the outside, a falling away, a slipping of ties. And on the inside, we will be ripped and shredded, torn as the bonds that hold us are pulled away.

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.

Perhaps he would ask me what books mean to me. I would tell him that it means living another life; that I am in love with both my lost best friend and my boyfriend and I need to believe in another life.

At moments like this, it amazes me that the words don’t come tumbling out of me. I can feel them in my mouth like three smooth pebbles. I can feel them there when I swallow and when I breathe.

I want him to be in love with me. Like a movie montage I can’t stop, scenes from the summer fly through my mind, moments when I thought, maybe, just maybe—