My Last Innocent Year

by Daisy Alpert Florin

In another life, Andy might have been an athlete, but in this one, his lean muscles were zipped under the thin skin of a poet, pale and blue-veined like the cheeses behind the glass display at Rosen’s.

“When you write, you have to take people to the closet. Not to the living room or the kitchen, not even to your bedroom. No, you take them straight to the goddamn closet, the place you keep your most secret, unmentionable things.”

So even though I followed the footprints, I wasn’t really on the trail.

While I was dabbling with the lowest bidder, they were interviewing for jobs in advertising, consulting, investment banking; jobs with benefits, jobs that paid.

“I’m starting to think cool jobs are for rich girls.”

We identified with her, which should have made us kinder but instead made us mean.

“Each time you happen to me all over again.”

All I felt was sad, as if this was all life was, an endless, interlocking chain of hurting people and being hurt in return.

If it was true what Roxanne said, that women cry when they’re angry, perhaps it was also true that men got angry when they were sad.

Sometimes it seemed like Zev was the only person here who saw me, really saw me, and maybe I’d let him fuck me to thank him for that.

Damn.

how easy it would be to slip into a life he created for me instead of having to make one of my own.

When I was older, I would learn that there were other men like him, men who would bandage your wounds and make you dinner and hold your injured hands across the table. But at twenty-two, I thought he was the only one, and I wondered how I would live the rest of my life without him.

I may not have understood the intricacies of a long marriage, but I knew what it meant to have your choices constrained by financial realities.

He had seen the end embedded in the beginning in a way I hadn’t. It was how adults behaved, I knew now, and I would never again not see the world in the same way.

Or maybe I would do nothing. I closed my eyes and let the feel of nothing sink in. It felt good. Nothing felt good.

But she was right, as mothers often are, particularly in the years we are least inclined to listen to them:

you can always start over in knitting, something you can never do in life. There is no such thing as a clean slate. We take our decisions with us, no matter how much we wish we could leave them behind.