The Collected Regrets of Clover

by Mikki Brammer

I loved how the city moved at simultaneous yet contrasting paces. One was the slow, mesmerized shuffle of first-time visitors to New York as they savored every detail of every streetscape. The other was a dexterous routine of sidestepping and outpacing those visitors, which locals had perfected to get from A to B as quickly as possible. It was like watching fish darting in and out of swaying seaweed.

“The saddest part, my darling,” Claudia said, freeing the gold bracelet that had been catching her cardigan sleeve, “is that most of us are guilty of that with our loved ones. We get stuck in a routine and we look at them as we’ve always looked at them, without seeing them for the person they’ve become or the person they strive to be. What a terrible thing to do to someone you love.”

It’s easy to glamorize the path you didn’t take.

“Like, when I was a kid, I’d always work myself into a panic thinking about death before I went to sleep at night. At first, it was that Sunday-school guilt, you know—was I doing all the right things to get into heaven? The potential of having a whole life to fuck it up was terrifying to me. There were just so many rules.”

When someone has always been there for you, it’s easy to assume they always will be. And then, one day, they’re not.

The fact that all of us were entangled—that everyone on the planet somehow shaped the course of one another’s lives, often without realizing it—felt like almost too much for me to comprehend.