Yerba buena

by Nina LaCour

“It feels like you,” she said. By which she meant it felt like something miraculous but tenuous. Something too precious to be hers forever, but something she would hold onto as long as she could.

Something was bound to catch up to them, even if it was only themselves.

It hurt the way she wanted it to. Not terribly, but enough. She closed her eyes and remembered their breakfast. She’d taken Spencer to a place she’d known he’d like, a diner. They’d chosen a booth by the window, looked out onto the morning. Palms swayed in the breeze. Pigeons pecked at scraps on the sidewalks. She’d pushed the last two pieces of bacon to the corner of her plate, a gift for her baby brother, who was fifteen years old and not a baby. Who wasn’t hers after all.

There was an intimacy to the moment, not a loneliness.

So this was how it felt—to be dealt a blow, to pause, to keep going in spite of it. Not to start over but to continue.

Emilie knew that things could be good—beautiful, even—and then, without warning, they could be over.

She would open her mouth and something true would come out. She had to—couldn’t hold so much in anymore.

And then I saw you in the restaurant, that first morning. You had ferns in your hands. I had to talk to you. And then later, after so much time, you appeared at the bar. And I took you home, and in my bed something happened. I was with you—I was always with you—but I was also with Annie. Like I was living two parts of my life at once. I was with both of you, somehow, is what I’m trying to say. It sounds crazy, I know. It sounds fucked up.” “No,” Emilie said. “It doesn’t.” “I can’t explain it.” “You don’t have to.”

She knew how this worked, had been through it before. Someone she loved would leave her. Her job was to stay quiet and still and out of the way. To wait, to not need anything, to trust they’d come back.

“I try so hard to be good. To be easy. To not be a mess. But maybe it’ll be okay with you if I’m messy. If I fuck up and do the wrong things. If I care about myself even when you’re going through too much already. Or maybe you’ll hear this and think I’m ugly and needy and selfish. I don’t know.