Yerba buena

by Nina LaCour

How easy it was to forget the rest when they were small and safe in the woods.

To be looked at in that way. To be loved by this beautiful girl.

She longed for the life of a fish. In and out of reeds they swam. All color and movement and blankness.

It was the most fascinating part of academia, Emilie thought, that even trashy television could be significant if you looked at it through a certain lens.

By the end of the night, they were all sprawled on the bed, tea light candles flickering and stomachs full, lips stained purple from the wine. They were all exactly where they wanted to be, and that place was with her, in her crappy studio, suddenly almost beautiful because of them. They didn’t even care about the flatware or the wineglasses—she knew it. They just liked that her home was a place where they could take off their shoes and stretch out on her bed and tell stories of mortification and stories of hope and get a little bit drunk. She wanted them to stay forever.

She wanted him so badly. “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.

“I think it’s … like, when you’re a passing person, other people believe what they want to about you. Whatever is easier or better for them. They see what they want to, in you. So if you don’t really know what you want—or if you know what you want, but it’s bad for you—you can veer off in the wrong direction.

And yet it frightened her when it was over. No emptiness this time. It frightened her, how open her heart was.

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.

Hey, Ulan, what made you leave your home? Back when you came to the U.S.?” “Opportunity,” he said. A single, definitive word. So much certainty in it.

‘I kissed you. I was in love with you, but I was also a fool.’”

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