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We are both smiling right now. How can it be so comfortable? How can I already feel so connected to him? From the moment we met yesterday, it was as if I was meant to know him, or perhaps, somehow, already did.
When he smiles at me, it’s like his whole heart is in his eyes. I sometimes wonder if it’s even possible for him to feel the way I do, this loopy, out-of-control adoration, but when I see him smiling at me like he is right now, it’s impossible to doubt it.
My voice is hushed as I meet his eye. “I think…no matter what universe we land in, we land there together.”
I sigh deeply. Lots of the people I graduated with love what they do and salivate at the idea of beginning a project. But graphic design was never my first choice, and I’m reminded of that every time Dee assigns me something new. “It’s not due until next week.”
Except spending a morning with Quinn was like being exposed to sunlight after an entire lifetime beneath fluorescent lights. I’m not sure, now, that I can be happy with less.
There’s this canyon between me and Jeff, and I think it’s always been there. We operate by shouting to each other over it, and it works, the shouting. It’s been fine. But now I’m seeing what it’s like to feel so close to another person I can barely tell where I end and he begins. And my God I want that. I miss it.
Even though I can feel in my chest what it was like to be in love with Nick, the kind of love that expands inside you until you’re so full it almost hurts.
But I’m happy. Not that lukewarm, milquetoast version of happy I normally am, but something so much better. For the first time, my soul is full. All I want in the world right now is more of him. More time, more knowledge.
I let myself picture an entire life like this, one in which all the beautiful and painful things in the world are shared with someone else, someone who feels them and sees them like I do. My eyes squeeze tight. I wish I could have that. I wish he was mine.
There is a connection between us, something physical I can’t put my finger on. It’s as if my nerve endings wake from a long rest whenever he’s near.
She is meant to be mine, and somehow today I need to convince her of that.
I don’t know how many lives I’ve lived with him, but it feels a little unfair that I can’t live this one with him too.
“Because I want to feel the way I do around you,
and I’m not willing to settle for less than that. And you shouldn’t be settling for less either.”
There is nothing different about my life. It just makes me feel numb. I think perhaps I’ve been numb for a very long time, and meeting Nick is what’s made me realize it.
That’s the problem though. I’m not sure how you stop craving joy, and fullness, once you realize they exist.
I’m never going to risk anything and I’m never going to know what it’s like to hand myself over to another person, to love someone so deeply and want him so much I’d give up anything on his behalf.
“What’s worse than the bad wind is the emptiness of letting nothing in at all,” he said.
But maybe even that is better than this stillness, than being so empty inside I’m not sure I care if the plane goes down. There are worse things than chaos and disaster. There is death.
“If you don’t come find me, there will never be a time when I won’t come find you.”
Should I tell him everything? I can’t. It will sound insane, and he’ll never believe me. I figured out the truth months ago and I hardly believe it myself. But I can’t lose him again. “I’m not going to let her separate us,” I promise him quietly. “Not this time.”
“Does this mean you’re mine now?” She smiles up at me. “I think maybe I always was.”
“The person you’re meant to be with. The one who accepts you in spite of everything and matters so much that the rest of the world matters less.”
“I think this is all harder because it feels like we’ve already waited forever. It’s like I’ve been missing you and craving you my entire life, at some level.”
So much about this feels like high school again, but high school as it should have been:
“I somehow found you once in London, and then I found you here, when I didn’t know who you were,” she says. “And nothing can keep me away from you now that I do.”
As if my heart is now somewhere outside my body, completely beyond my control.
