If He Had Been with Me

by Laura Nowlin

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

With my new friends, being weird is a good thing, as long as it’s the same weird as them.

I am running across the lawn with the others, banging my pot and looking up at the stars and illegal fireworks my neighbors are setting off. We scream as if we have heard wonderful news. We shout a happy new year to each other and the trees and the others we cannot see out there, shouting at the sky like us. We scream as if this display of joy will frighten all our fears away, as if we already know nothing bad will happen to us this year, and are happy for it.

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.

It’s a silly rebellion, eating mashed potatoes with my bare hands on the front porch after midnight, but it’s what I have at the moment.

I remember how, whenever I was sad, I would signal him with my flashlight, and he would take the cup up on his side of the string strung between our windows, and we would talk until we both fell asleep.

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’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.

After a day spent in bed reading, I have a groggy feeling of unreality, as if I am only watching everything that is happening.

This is my life, I realize. And I haven’t made any tragic mistakes yet. I’ve made a choice, yes, but no one suffers for it but me, and in the end, all will be well.

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.

They’ve loved each other nearly their whole lives, yet are not in love. They are passionate and devoted. They are bound to and balanced by each other—the outer chaos of Angelina’s life and my mother’s inner darkness, Angelina’s strength and my mother’s will. I imagine Angelina’s fingers twine in her hair and rest there. “I love you,” she says. She always will.

“I’m fine,” I say. I always am. Comparatively. I cannot imagine not wanting to live. I cannot imagine not believing that it will be better someday. I cannot imagine that there is nothing left to see, that there is nothing to tie me to Earth. As long as I want to live, then I must be fine.

I think I have read every book at the library. Every novel, that is. Every novel that I want to read. Or might be willing to give a try. If someone had told me that this was possible ten years ago, I wouldn’t have believed it. Books are unlimited.

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

“Can you see me?” He waves. I laugh. “Yeah,” I say. “I’m waving back.” “Hi,” he says. “Hi,” I say.

they finally admit that they would rather ruin their perfect love trying to make it work because being unhappy together is better than being unhappy apart.

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

And I come into this room and lock the door behind me.

Just because something seems impossible doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try.