The Seven Year Slip

by Ashley Poston

My aunt used to say, if you don’t fit in, fool everyone until you do. She also said to keep your passport renewed, to pair red wines with meats and whites with everything else, to find work that is fulfilling to your heart as well as your head, to never forget to fall in love whenever you can find it because love is nothing if not a matter of timing, and to chase the moon.

I loved how a book, a story, a set of words in a sentence organized in the exact right order, made you miss places you’ve never visited, and people you’ve never met.

my aunt was a lot of things—loving and adventurous, but also messy and human. Something I never really recognized until the very end.

And there was a gap between early twenties and late twenties that only people existing in bodies in their late twenties understood. You could still fight god, but you’d have to ice your knees afterward.

thought that afternoon I could google Iwan, but I barely had a second to pee because an adult subscription book box decided to feature one of our celebrity memoirs alongside a bar of soap in the shape of an unmentionable, complete with a sucker on the back to stick it to the bathroom wall, and I spent my entire afternoon putting out that fire.

i giggled

“It was good to see you again, Lemon,” before he slipped out of the conference room, and I was left, mouth open, staring after him.

Sometimes the people you love don’t leave you with goodbyes—they just leave.

When he lit up, we were like moths to a flame.

He thought about it for a good half a minute. That was really what I loved about my dad. He was kind and patient. He evened out my mom, who was loud and quick and bombastic, so I always liked to tell my dad big news first before surprising Mom. “I think,” he finally said, choosing his words carefully, “that nothing lasts forever. Not the good things, not the bad. So just find what makes you happy, and do it for as long as you can.”

That was love, wasn’t it? It wasn’t just a quick drop—it was falling, over and over again, for your person. It was falling as they became new people. It was learning how to exist with every new breath. It was uncertain and it was undeniably hard, and it wasn’t something you could plan for. Love was an invitation into the wild unknown, one step at a time together.

Sometimes the people you loved left you halfway through a story. Sometimes they left you without a goodbye. And, sometimes, they stayed around in little ways. In the memory of a musical. In the smell of their perfume. In the sound of the rain, and the itch for adventure, and the yearning for that liminal space between one airport terminal and the next. I hated her for leaving, and I loved her for staying as long as she could. And I would never wish this pain on anyone.

Because the things that mattered most never really left. The love stays. The love always stays, and so do we.