The Seven Year Slip

by Ashley Poston

He just looked like a loud kind of person, but he was also mesmerizing to watch. He moved through the world with this air of nonchalance—like he didn’t care what anyone else thought. It was infectious.

“You are you, and that’s a lovely person to be.”

“It was good to see you again, Lemon,”

“After you met that girl, right?” Something changed in James’s posture then, as we leaned against each other. He went rigid. “Not this story.” “Oh, come on.” Isa rolled her eyes, and told me, “He never shut up about her. Not once, not for a second. What was her name? It had something to do with a song, right?” “A song?” I both did and didn’t want to know. “Yeah,” Miguel agreed, and started to sing it. “Oh my darling, oh my darling, oh my darling Clementine.”

Right—he thought I went back to the apartment last night, and had sex with his past self to make his present self jealous.

Everything would run its course—come into my life and then leave again, because nothing stayed. Nothing ever stayed. But things could return.

“You are way too smart and way too beautiful and way too successful to have some D-list guitarist from a no-name band treat you like you’re replaceable. You aren’t.”

“What if I n-never find anyone else?” “But what if you do?” I asked, squeezing her hands tightly. “You deserve to find out.”

“I didn’t find out who I wanted to be until I was almost forty. You have to try on a lot of shoes until you find some you like walking in. Never apologize for that. Once I found mine, I’ve been content for twenty years.”

“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.

It was the kind of pain that didn’t exist to someday be healed by pretty words and good memories. It was the kind of pain that existed because, once upon a time, so did she. And I carried that pain, and that love, and that terrible, terrible day, with me. I got comfortable with it. I walked with it.

I hated her for leaving, and I loved her for staying as long as she could.

He pulled me into the middle of the restaurant and stood behind me, wrapping his arms around my middle, his chin on my shoulder, as he slowly turned me to a blank space on the wall in the middle of the restaurant. “It’s for you, if you ever find the inspiration to put something there.”

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