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.

That’s what a perfect meal is—something that you don’t just eat, but something you enjoy. With friends, and family—maybe even with strangers. It’s an experience.

“When was the last time you did something for the first time?”

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.

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.

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

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,

Who I was at the beginning of writing this book isn’t the person I ended up being at the end.

Grief can find you in the middle of the night as you roll over to go back to sleep. It can even find you in your dreams.

book is a time capsule. No matter how much I change, or will change, or will learn, this book will be stagnant.