The Seven Year Slip

by Ashley Poston

For all the food lovers out there who burn popcorn in the microwave: we’d be too strong if we could cook, too

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. Always, always chase the moon.

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If you aren’t sure which fork to use at a fancy dinner? Go along with the person beside you. Lost in a city you’ve lived in for most of your life? Pretend you’re a tourist. Listening to an opera after never hearing one ever before? Nod and comment on the chilling vibrato. Sitting in a Michelin-starred restaurant drinking a bottle of red wine that costs more than your monthly apartment rent? Comment on the body and act like you’ve tasted better.

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.

“One moment you are in the present in the hall”—she pointed toward the front door, as if it was a journey she had lived already, retracing her steps in the map of her memory—“the next you open the door and you slip through time into the past. Seven years.” Then, a little quieter, “It’s always seven years.”

and all the while she told my aunt this absolutely impossible story. Of an apartment that sometimes slipped through time—seven years forward, seven years back.

All the while, my aunt stayed the same, afraid to keep anything too long in fear it might spoil. She only ever had two rules in this apartment—one, always take your shoes off by the door. And two: never fall in love.

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

“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.”

before. “I think your favorite color is yellow,” he guessed, and watched as the surprise trickled across my face. “But not a bright yellow—more of a golden yellow. The color of sunflowers. That might even be your favorite flower.” My mouth fell open.

My aunt’s story was raw in my memory. First rule, always take your shoes off by the door. Second, never fall in love in this apartment.

“You gave me the moon, my darling!” she had said happily. “Oh, what a lovely and impossible gift.” She had always told me to chase the moon. To surround myself with people who would lasso it down in a heartbeat.

It is rarely the food that truly makes a meal, but the people we share it with. A family spaghetti recipe passed down from your grandma. The smell of dumplings clinging to a sweater you haven’t washed in years. A cardboard pizza across a yellow table. A friend, lost in a memory, but alive in the taste of a half-burnt brownie. Love in a lemon pie.

“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.

I met you in my time, and you’re so different, I wanted to tell him, pressing my face into his chest, but I doubt he’d believe me. I don’t know why you changed. I don’t know how.

“Pretend to belong until you do.”

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.

“She always said dancing in the rain made you live longer,”

I think I love you, I wanted to say, but not to this Iwan.

:(

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—

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Felt over a new tattoo I’d never seen before. My eyebrows furrowed. “When did you get this?” He looked down at the tattoo, and then sheepishly back at me. “About seven years ago. It’s a bit faded now—” “It’s a lemon flower.” “Yes,” he replied, looking up into my eyes, searching them. He’d gotten a lemon flower tattooed over his heart. “What do you tell people, when they ask about it?” His shyness melted into a smile, warm and gooey like chocolate. “I tell them about a girl I fell in love with at the right place but the wrong time.” A knot lodged in my throat. “And what are you going to tell them now?” “That we finally got the timing right.” “A matter of time,” I whispered. “A matter of timing,” he proposed,

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