The Seven Year Slip

by Ashley Poston

keep your passport renewed,

to find work that is fulfilling to your heart as well as your head,

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.

Food”—he motioned to our almost empty plates—“is a work of art. That’s what a perfect meal is—something that you don’t just eat, but something you enjoy. With friends, and family—maybe

some of my favorite things I haven’t even done yet.”

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

You can plan everything in your life, and you’ll still be taken by surprise.

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 can say things with food that you can’t quite with words sometimes.”

Could you have done something, been that voice that finally broke through? If you loved them more, if you paid more attention, if you were better, if you only asked, if you even knew to ask, if you could just read between the lines and— If, if, if.

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

“Enjoy the rain! You never know when it will be your last.”

“Life doesn’t always go as planned. The trick is to make the most of it when it doesn’t,”

“Isn’t it strange how the world works sometimes? It’s never a matter of time, but a matter of timing.”

I wanted to start living my life like I was enjoying every moment that I had it.

“If you do it right,” I repeated, “once is all you need.”

Mom. “I think,” he finally said, choosing his words carefully, “that nothing lasts forever. Not the good things, not the bad. So just find what makes you happy, and do it for as long as you can.”

“You will be happiest when you’re on your own adventure.

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.

She lived because she loved, and she lived because she was loved,

The love stays. The love always stays, and so do we.

The art stays the same, but you change, and as you change, so does what the art means to you—even as it allows you a window into who you once were and the people you once loved, and still love.

It changes, but in little ways, it all stays. Everything stays.