The Seven Year Slip

by Ashley Poston

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

Change wasn’t always a bad thing, like my aunt had convinced herself to believe. It wasn’t always a good thing, either. It could be neutral—it could be okay. Things changed, people changed.

And I knew instantly then that I wanted to be just like her—exactly like her. Someone who had their life together. Someone successful. Someone who knew themselves. But in trying to be Rhonda, I’d never stopped to think about what parts of myself I’d shaved away.

“Until she met someone in that terrible, lovely apartment who made her want just a little more.”

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.

There was never grief without love or love without grief, and I chose to think that my aunt lived because of them. Because of all the light and love and joy that she found in the shadows of everything that plagued her. She lived because she loved, and she lived because she was loved, and what a lovely lifetime she gave us.

He pulled me into the middle of the restaurant and stood behind me, wrapping his arms around my middle, his chin on my shoulder, as he slowly turned me to a blank space on the wall in the middle of the restaurant. “It’s for you, if you ever find the inspiration to put something there.”

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