The Seven Year Slip

by Ashley Poston

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.

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.

you could live somewhere your entire life and still find things to surprise you.

“You are who you are, and you like what you like,” he replied, and there was no sarcasm in his voice. “You are you, and that’s a lovely person to be.”

It is rarely the food that truly makes a meal, but the people we share it with.

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.

I missed her every day. I missed her in ways I didn’t yet understand—in ways I wouldn’t find out for years to come.

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.

I hugged them all, thankful to have friends like these, who were there for me when I didn’t need them, and running toward me when I did.

There was never grief without love or love without grief,

She lived because she loved, and she lived because she was loved, and what a lovely lifetime she gave us.

I wasn’t sure what to say. “All seven years?” “Two thousand five hundred and fifty-five days. Not that I was counting,”

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