The Seven Year Slip

by Ashley Poston

MY AUNT USED TO say, if you don’t fit in, fool everyone until you do.

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.

She waltzed through life like she belonged at every party she was never invited to, fell in love with every lonely heart she found, and found luck in every adventure.

She was the master of belonging.

I didn’t even know what love was supposed to feel like.

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.

Why was I still here alone, on this couch, listening to the sounds of a city that kept moving forward, and forward, and forward, while I still mourned somewhere in the past?

read F*CK THE PATRIARCHY.

Okay swiftie

Like the pages of a book, uniting a prologue with a happy ending, an epilogue with a tragic beginning, two middles, two climaxes, two stories that never quite meet in the world outside.

“the next you open the door and you slip through time into the past. Seven years.”

She loved her so much, she began to call her “my sunshine.”

that the heartbreak was important, too.

“A lot can happen in seven years.”

Travel is about the gorgeous feeling of teetering in the unknown.’”

“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.”

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

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.

He might have been the most handsome man I’d ever seen. But especially when he blushed.

“Universal truths in butter. Secrets folded into the dough. Poetry in the spices. Romance in a chocolate. Love in a lemon pie.”

I didn’t realize how hungry I was for touch, for something good, something warm and sweet, until I got a taste.

“You kiss like you dance,” he murmured against my mouth. I broke away, suddenly appalled. “Terribly?” He laughed, but it was low and deep in his throat, half a growl, as he stole another kiss again. “Like someone waiting to be asked. You can just dance, Lemon. You can take the lead.” “And you’ll follow?” “To the moon and back,”

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.

“You could never be a bad idea, Lemon.”

And then I looked into his grayish-blue eyes, and I knew exactly how I’d paint them—I’d paint them like the moon.

But when I finally stopped for a moment and looked around, he was— Everywhere.

“It was good to see you again, Lemon,” before he slipped out of the conference room, and I was left, mouth open, staring after him.

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

“You seem to always visit right when I need company,” he murmured. “Company—or me?” He leaned back a little, looking up at me with those beautiful stormy eyes—like clouds before autumn’s first snow. “You, I think,”

“I’m going to kiss every part of you. I’m going to commit every piece of you to memory.”

and I knew I was falling. The kind of falling that would hurt when I hit the ground. The kind of falling that would shatter me into pieces. So I kissed him, feeling bright and reckless and brave, and I fell.

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. And I loved this man so much, I needed to let him go. This him. The one in my past.

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. And I would never wish this pain on anyone.

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

And we laughed, and charted each other’s bodies down to our cores, maps of places that were familiar and yet new, and the night was good, and my heart was full, and I was happy, so happy, to fall in love on a night like this, where I felt like I had finally caught the moon, and more.

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