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.

Fight was a strong word for it, though. It felt more like a shrug and a white flag tossed onto an already-abandoned battlefield.

meat. He brought both to the yellow table and didn’t even ask before he took out a new bottle of wine. “I remembered you liked rosé, so I bought more just in case you came back around,” he said, to my surprise, and motioned over to the table. “We can eat.”

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

“Ah.” James nodded, biting in a smile that was just a little bit crooked, and the hollow part of my chest ached—the part that had been carved out by grief. It ached for something warm. For something good. For something that maybe, just maybe, could stay. A smile and a bittersweet story over lemon pie.

We talked until our cinnamon-sugar-crusted fingers hit the bottom of the chip bag, and it was a good night. The kind of good night that I hadn’t had in a while. The kind of good that stuck to your bones, thick and warm, and coated your soul in golden light. Good food with good friends.

That was the thing about my aunt, she lived in the moment because she always figured it’d be her last. There was never a rhyme or reason to it—even when she was healthy, she lived like she was dying, the taste of mortality on her tongue. I used to love the way she saw the world, always as one last breath before the end, drinking in everything as if she never would again, and maybe I still loved bits of that.

Her mouth twisted into a smile so big and so dangerous, I felt my heartache break way to something else—excitement. A longing for something new. “Let’s go on an adventure, my darling,” she declared. And, oh, did I realize then, that I had the thirst for adventure sown into my very bones.

And Penelope Grayson Torres, born at eight pounds and ten ounces, was, in fact, amazing. Even when she spit up all over me.

“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.

“Clementine.” And the way he said my name just then felt like a promise, a vow against loneliness and heartache, and I could listen to the way his tongue wrapped around the letters of my name for the rest of my life,