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.

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.

My aunt used to say that you could live somewhere your entire life and still find things to surprise you.

“Find fulfilling work, fall in love, and chase the moon.”

I stared at him. “Your life changed because of some French fries?” He barked a laugh, bright and golden, and said to my utter surprise, “The things you least expect usually do.”

I’d gone through the worst day of my life by myself, and I came out the other side a person who survived it. That was not something to fix. I didn’t need to be fixed. I just needed…to be reminded that I was human.

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.

And I was afraid of it, because I’d spent so long trying to find somewhere permanent to stay.

She left and I was still here and there were so many things she hadn’t done yet, or wouldn’t ever do in the future.

“I can’t tell you. I think she was always a little afraid of a good thing coming to an end, and oh, we were a good thing,”

“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.”

“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.” I set down my butter knife, and put my napkin over my plate. “And if I can’t find that?” “You might not,” he replied, “but then again, you might. You don’t know what the future holds, sweetheart.”

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. I changed, too. I was allowed to. I wanted to. I was.

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.

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

Books are like a magical apartment in that way, capturing a singular point in time when an author writes a book that maybe, someday, a future you will visit and read.

Grief is a weird thing. It can be a monster on your shoulder. It can be a friend sitting with you at the table. It can be a memory in a smell—the soft, delicate notes of floral perfume. 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. And grief—what it looks like, how it whispers, how you respond—is different for everyone.