The Seven Year Slip

by Ashley Poston

Everything about it was magical—the way the light poured into the kitchen in the mornings, golden like egg yolk. The way the study seemed to fit more books than possible, pouring off the shelves and piled against the far window, so high they almost blocked out all the light.

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. Always, always chase the moon.

that every time I walked through the door, I expected to see my aunt there in her wingback chair the color of robin’s eggs, but the chair was gone. So was its owner.

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 great storyteller. Everything she said, she made me want to believe, even while I was figuring out that Santa Claus didn’t really exist.

Of an apartment that sometimes slipped through time—seven years forward, seven years back.

I found myself enchanted by the memory of my aunt on my parents’ front doorstep seven years ago, asking me on an adventure, as if time in and of itself was infinite. As if she knew, with that gleam in her eyes, that something was about to happen.

This man felt like he could exist anywhere and call it home, too much like my aunt, too much like the person I had wanted to be.

We swayed in my aunt’s cluttered teal kitchen to a song about heartache and happy endings, and it was so tempting to just let myself unravel. For the first time in what felt like forever.

“You gave me the moon, my darling!” she had said happily. “Oh, what a lovely and impossible gift.” 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.

His pale eyes were a perfect and cloudy gray, like my favorite autumn days, perfect for dirty chai lattes and chunky scarves. The way he looked at me made my stomach burn.

“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.

Hehehe

People are the most important thing in any kitchen.”

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. Your head never remembers the things your heart wants to in hindsight.

My heart felt full and heavy thinking about the Iwan waiting for me in my aunt’s apartment, and the one here with us now, so different and yet so similar.

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.

There was a possibility in the sound of the lock clicking open, in the creak of the hinges as the door flung wide, a roulette that may or may not bring you back to the time when you felt happiest.

I wanted to shake him, and I wanted to bring out the man I sometimes saw between the cracks, but I couldn’t.

There was something nice about doing it again, sitting at the same park benches, feeding the same ducks in the pond, so well-worn and natural. Not safe, really, because each trip was different, but familiar. Like meeting an old friend seven years later.

When he left, I’d meet him outside on the sidewalk. I’d catch a cab with him, and it made my heart ache at the realization that we had crossed each other, time and again, like ships in the night.

And I told him a strange story, about a place between places that bled like watercolors. A place that felt, sometimes, like it had a mind of its own. I only told him the magical bits, the parts that clung to my bones like warm soup in winter.

Seven years ago, I was someone else entirely, trying on different hats to see which one fit best, which skin I was comfortable with sharing. Seven years ago, he was this bright-eyed dishwasher with soap under his nails, wearing overstretched shirts, trying to find his dream, and in the present, he was glossy and sure of himself, though when he smiled, the cracks showed, and they were cracks that most people probably

I missed her every day. I missed her in ways I didn’t yet understand—in ways I wouldn’t find out for years to come. I missed her with this deep sort of regret, even though there was nothing I could have done.

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