How to Love

I think of how it felt to lose him, slow and painful and confusing, and how it felt to wonder if I'd ever really had him at all.

It's a myth that boys don't like to gossip.

It occurs to me, not for the first time, that things change whether you're around to notice them or not.

The hideous thing is this: I want to forgive him. Even after everything, I do. A baby before my 17th birthday and a future as lonely as the surface of the moon and still the sight of him feels like a homecoming, like a song I used to know but somehow forgot.

Nothing about you, my dear, has ever been lost on me.

My eyes had been closed for a few minutes when he said it: "I love you," he muttered, so quiet, like a prayer whispered into my neck. "Hmm?" I was nearly asleep myself, edges blurring; I was one hundred percent sure I'd misheard. "I love you." He said it again, clearer this time, right into my ear, breath tickling. I felt like a hydrogen bomb. I tried to be very still, but I knew he could feel my entire body tensing, a runner ready to begin a race -- Get set-- Go. I opened my mouth, shut it again. Oh God. I did love him, is the awfulness of it. I'd loved Sawyer since the seventh grade, when Allie and I began keeping a list of the places we spotted him. I loved his quick, blistered musician hands and the honest soul he kept hidden safe under all his bravado, and I loved how I was still, every day, learning him. I loved his silly, secret goofy side and the way he had of making me feel like I was a tall tree, just from the way he looked at my face. I loved Sawyer LeGrande so much that sometimes I couldn't sit still for the fullness of it, but when I opened up my mouth to tell him so, nothing came out. I could do anything for him, I realized suddenly. I could give him anything. But not that. If I said that to him, I knew I could never get it back. "Go to sleep," I whispered, and he didn't say it again.

I like him so stupidly much.

...the feeling of standing on the edge of a canyon and screaming, waiting for an echo that refused to come.

...I hate myself for letting him know that I still think about him, that I carry him around inside my skin.

Hey, Sawyer?" "Yeah? What’s up?" " I love you, you know that?" "I-…I do know that, actually. But- Jesus, Reena.” He laughs a bit, disbelieving. “It’s nice to hear.” It’s nice to say, I want to tell him, then realize I’ve got a whole country to say it. I’ve got a whole continent. I’ve got the whole world.

I am remembering so clearly how he looked when he was eight, when he was eleven, when he was seventeen. Sawyer and I were only together for a few months before he left, but he was my golden boy for so long before that he would have taken the guts of me with him even if we’d never been a couple at all.

I loved ... the honest soul he kept hidden safe under all his bravado, and I loved how I was still, every day, learning him.

...it occurs to me that one day was never meant to hold so much.

...somehow this seems inevitable, the natural course of things. Maybe he's a homing pigeon. Maybe I'm his home.

Wait, I almost shouted, but didn't, and that would be my burden to bear.

Kissing him feels familiar but also new, a song they haven’t played on the radio in a really long time.

Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.

It felt like he could open up my head and see inside.

I couldn't figure out how you could go from feeling so close to a person one minute to not being sure if you even knew them the next.

Do you miss her? I blinked. Did I what? This was my best friend since preschool we were talking about, the girl whose snack and math homework I’d shared since before I had memorized my own phone number, who’d buried her cold, annoying little feet underneath me during a thousand different movie nights and showed me how to use a tampon. She’d grown up in my kitchen, she was my shadow- self—or I was hers— and Sawyer wanted to know if I missed her? What the hell kind of question was that?

I like how the implication there is that the fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in me. Give me the car keys.

...as if there's some invisible string that kept us tethered the entire time he was away and that's tightening now...

It feels like we’re circling something here, like maybe we both know where this is headed. Like maybe we sort of always have.

I just didn't know how to do this, ...the clang and chatter... . And more than that, I didn't particularly want to learn.

A future as lonely as the surface of the moon and still just the sight of him feels like a homecoming, like a song I used to know but forgot.

...he would have taken the guts of me with him even if we'd never been a couple at all.

Wait, I almost shouted, but didn’t, and that would be my burden to bear. Instead, I stood on the curb and I watched him disappear, lights fading in the distance like waking up from a dream.

One thing about living in South Florida is that everywhere you go is violently air-conditioned,

In the morning, I wake up and find a pomegranate on my doorstep: red and perfect, round as the world itself.

(my whole life a holding pattern, some variation on wait and see)