The Seven Year Slip

by Ashley Poston

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.

“You’re an Excel spreadsheet to my chaos.”

Why was I still here alone, on this couch, listening to the sounds of a city that kept moving forward, and forward, and forward, while I still mourned somewhere in the past?

“Let’s go chase the moon, my darling Clementine.”

“You are who you are, and you like what you like,” he replied, and there was no sarcasm in his voice. “You are you, and that’s a lovely person to be.”

“I think your favorite color is yellow,” he guessed, and watched as the surprise trickled across my face. “But not a bright yellow—more of a golden yellow. The color of sunflowers. That might even be your favorite flower.”

“New things are scary.” “They don’t have to be.”

You can plan everything in your life, and you’ll still be taken by surprise.

There was something just so reassuring about books. They had beginnings and middles and ends, and if you didn’t like a part, you could skip to the next chapter. If someone died, you could stop on the last page before, and they’d live on forever. Happy endings were definite, evils defeated, and the good lasted forever.

She had always told me to chase the moon. To surround myself with people who would lasso it down in a heartbeat.

I didn’t need to be fixed. I just needed . . . to be reminded that I was human.

I didn’t realize how hungry I was for touch, for something good, something warm and sweet, until I got a taste.

You can take the lead.” “And you’ll follow?” “To the moon and back,”

You never commit a mundane moment to memory, thinking it’ll be the last time you’ll hear their voice, or see their smile, or smell their perfume.

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

He was an adventure. One I suddenly knew I wanted to take.

“Enjoy the rain! You never know when it will be your last.”

“Life doesn’t always go as planned. The trick is to make the most of it when it doesn’t,”

“Isn’t it strange how the world works sometimes? It’s never a matter of time, but a matter of timing.”

“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.

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.

There was never grief without love or love without grief,

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