One Last Stop

But, you know, that feeling? When you wake up in the morning and you have somebody to think about? Somewhere for hope to go? It's good. Even when it's bad, it's good.

Sometimes the point is to be sad, August. Sometimes you just have to feel it because it deserves to be felt.

When you spend your whole life alone, it's incredibly appealing to move somewhere big enough to get lost in. Where being alone looks like a choice.

I fell in love with you the day that I met you, and then I fell in love with the person you remembered you are. I got to fall in love with you twice. That’s— that’s magic. You’re the first thing I’ve believed in since— since I don’t even remember, okay, you’re— you’re movies and destiny and every stupid, impossible thing, and it’s not because of the fucking train, it’s because of you. It’s because you fight and you care and you’re always kind but never easy, and you won’t let anything take that away from you. You’re my hero, Jane. I don’t care if you think you’re not one. You are.

Nobody tells you how those nights that stand out in your memory—levee sunset nights, hurricane nights, first kiss nights, homesick sleepover nights, nights when you stood at your bedroom window and looked at the lilies one porch over and thought they would stand out, singular and crystallized, in your memory forever—they aren't really anything. They're everything, and they're nothing. They make you who you are, and they happen at the same time a twenty-three-year-old a million miles away is warming up some leftovers, turning in early, switching off the lamp. They're so easy to lose.

You have fallen into the homoerotic queer girl friendship. It’s all cute at first, and then you catch feelings, and it’s impossible to tell if the joke flirting is actual flirting and if the platonic cuddling is romantic cuddling, and next thing you know, three years have gone by, and you’re obsessed with her, and you haven’t done anything about it because you’re too terrified to fuck up the friendship by guessing it wrong, so instead you send each other horny plausible deniability love letters until you’re both dead.

Maybe I don’t know what fills it in yet, but I can look at the space around where I sit in the world, what creates that shape, and I can care about what it’s made of, if it’s good, if it hurts anyone, it makes people happy, if it makes me happy. And that can be enough for now.

Of course I love you. I could go back in time and have a whole life and get old and never see you again, and you would still be it. You were— you are the love of my life.

You can try, she guesses. You can tear yourself apart and rebuild from stratch, bring yourself to every corner of the map, sew a new self from the scraps of a thousand other people and places. You can try to escape to fill a different shape. But at the end of the day, there's a place at the foot of the bed where your shoes hit the floor, and it's the same. It's always the same.

Jane is spun sugar. A switchblade girl with a cotton-candy heart.

The older she’s gotten, the more she prefers thinking of love as a hobby for other people, like rock climbing or knitting. Fine, enviable even, but she doesn’t feel like investing in the equipment.

There was this girl. I met her on a train. The first time I saw her, she was covered in coffee and smelled like pancakes, and she was beautiful like a city you always wanted to go to, like how you wait years and years for the right time, and then as soon as you get there, you have to taste everything and touch everything and know every street by name. I felt like I knew her. She reminded me who I was. She had soft lips and green eyes and a body that wouldn’t quit. Hair like you wouldn’t believe. Stubborn, sharp as a knife. And I never, ever wanted a person to save me until she did.

You're the most important person I've ever met." she says. "And I should have never met you at all.

Oh my God. She literally shorted out the train because she was horny… She’s an icon

How does she explain that she used to be afraid to love anyone because there’s a well at the center of her chest and she doesn’t know where the bottom is?

There's this feeling August has had everywhere she's ever lived, like she's not really there. Like it's all happening in a dream. She walks down the street, and it's like she's floating a few inches off the pavement, never rooted down. She touches things, a canister of sugar at a coffee shop, or the post of a street sign warm from the afternoon sun, and it feels like she hasn't touched anything at all, like it's all a place she lives in concept. She's just out here, shoes untied, hair a mess, no idea where she's going, scraping her knees and not bleeding.

New York takes from her, sometimes. But she takes too. She takes its muggy air in fistfuls, and she packs it into the cracks in her heart.

Her girl. She came back.

Because you got what you need. And sometimes, the universe has your back.

The first time I let myself fall, it wasn’t hot at all. It was cold. January. There was ice on the sidewalks— at least, that’s what I’d heard. But this girl felt like nectarines and balconies to me. She felt like everything. She felt like a long winter, then a nervous spring, then a sticky summer, and then those last days you never thought you’d get to, the ones that spread themselves out, out, out until they feel like they go on forever. So, August is a person.

August Landry does not trust people, but she trusts fried chicken.

For what it’s worth, you’ve never disappointed me once since I’ve met you

she can’t believe Jane had the nerve, the audacity, to become the one thing August can’t resist: a mystery.

You’ve got a brighter glow than you realize

Maybe no good timing means there's no bad timing either.

Your friendly smile of acceptance - from the safe position of heterosexuality,' " Jane reads aloud, " 'isn't enough. As long as you cherish that secret belief that you are a little bit better because you sleep with the opposite sex, you are still asleep in your cradle... and we will be the nightmare that awakens you.

Sometimes August thinks Jane looks like a watercolor painting, fluid and lovely, darker in places, bleeding through the page.

She doesn’t plant a seed of friendship and tend to it with gentle watering and sunlight. She drops into your life, fully formed, and just is. A friend in completion