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. Always, always chase the moon.

“I thought I could find her, that it would be easy—that it would be like seeing someone you once knew on a crowded sidewalk, and your eyes meet, and time stands still. But time never stands still,” she added bitterly. “A lot can happen in seven years.”

‘Travel is about the gorgeous feeling of teetering in the unknown.’ ”

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. You taste it, you savor it, you feel the story told through the intricate flavors that play out across your tongue…it’s magical. Romantic.”

“Universal truths in butter. Secrets folded into the dough. Poetry in the spices. Romance in a chocolate. Love in a lemon pie.”

After all, I didn’t know what love—romantic love, toe-curling love—felt like. So how could I fall for it?

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

My aunt used to tell me that summer nights in the city were made to be impossible. They were as brief as you needed them, but never long enough, when the roads stretched into the darkness, the skyscrapers climbed into the stars, and when you tipped your head back, the sky felt infinite.

“She was so afraid of change. She was afraid we would grow apart. She didn’t want to ruin it, so she did what she did best—she preserved it for herself. Those feelings, that moment. I was so mad at her,” she admitted, “for years. For years I was angry. And then I stopped being so angry. That was just who she was, and it was a part of her I loved with the rest of her. It was how she knew how to live, and it wasn’t all bad. It was good, too. The memories are good.”

It’s never a matter of time, but a matter of timing.”

The way it tried to be something new, and ended up being nothing at all.

You have to try on a lot of shoes until you find some you like walking in. Never apologize for that.

summer, kissing every foreign boy I met in shadowy bars. Love wasn’t something that I looked for, it was something I made, over and over again, to try and forget the guy who broke my heart.

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.

It would keep breaking our hearts, everyone who knew her, over and over and over again. 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.

Sometimes the people you loved left you halfway through a story.