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.

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.

She had always told me to chase the moon. To surround myself with people who would lasso it down in a heartbeat.

Romance wasn’t in chocolate, it was in the gasp of breath as we came up for air. It was in the way he cradled my face, the way I traced my finger over the crescent-shaped birthmark on his collarbone. It was in the way he muttered how beautiful I was, the way it made my heart soar. It was in the way I wanted to know everything about him—his favorite songs, finally guess his favorite color.

He was like a brandy I wanted to drink on a clear summer day, a golden afternoon I wanted to get lost in, an evening over cardboard pizza and lemon pie that was never the same twice—

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