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 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.

When she found Vera in the present, she was different. She had changed, bit by bit, the way years often did,

“So I let her go,” my aunt said, “rather than be burdened with me.”

And Vera moved on. Two kids on her own. She moved back to her hometown to raise them. Went back to college. Became a lawyer. She grew and she changed and she became someone new, as time always made you. And she had not looked back.

“A few of my friends would argue that you can’t be uncultured in food because the idea of cultured food derives from the gentrification of recipes in general.”

“I haven’t paid my dues—” “And who decides on what dues you need to pay? If you want something, you have to go for it. No one else will be more on your side than you.”

“Be merciless about your dreams, Iwan.”

“Do you regret it?” “If I said I did,” he replied, looking thoughtful, “would that be a disservice to the past me who dreamed of getting here? Probably.”

“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. Once I found mine, I’ve been content for twenty years.”

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.