Talking at Night

by Claire Daverley

I wish I’d done everything on earth with you. baz luhrmann’s the great gatsby, 2013

Rosie takes her plate with two hands, notices that her own square is smaller than everyone else’s.

Do you like him? There is a silence, clockless and lamplit. Because if you do, Marley goes on, then none of the other stuff matters.

the love he feels is bigger than anything he’s felt before, bigger than his anger and his pain, his desire and his fury, and this, to him, is entirely new, and the right thing, he knows, is to keep it to himself.

I’d say you just love the idea of her, then, she says. You’re pinning everything on something you’ve never even had. Something that’s not real.

just think, she says, and she stands up, takes her empty coffee cup to the side, that you only get one life, you know? So what’s the point in spending it miserable, or inert?

She does not feel satisfied, but she feels safe and calm and poised, and that’s okay, because that’s what she’d needed. What she needs.

oop!

I wish I’d done everything on earth with you, she says.

If he’s honest, it’s because he likes it. The routine, or the calm, that means he has not felt his heart pain in the longest time. He does not know what has lifted it, exactly. Years of medication, maybe. Or the exercise, or living alone, without a woman, or the peace he’s made with the things he did and the people who left and the way the sun keeps rising, regardless. He misses some things. Some people. Knows, though, that that’s just the way of things, and he prefers the balance, the rest, unexciting and mundane and, it turns out, all that he seems to need.

I think about you all the time, Will, Rosie plunges on. And I know I don’t deserve to. I know we had our chance, and I blew it. More than once. But I wish I’d just stopped, for one damn second, and realized I was trying to do the right thing for everyone else, which just made everything wrong, in the end, you know?