I have terrible luck with the date Dec. 31. Six years apart and somehow uncoordinated, two of my hometown best friends proclaimed love confessions to me on this day.
The second time, the gesture is incredibly sweet. My heart sighs a little—how could it not?—but my head gently chides, “You can’t have this. You know you go back to Philly in two days.” I force myself to smile politely.
In my creative writing seminar, we joke that dating a writer must be hard, not knowing whether your next move will be immortalized in writing like an ugly haircut. You might become the bad guy without knowing. Hell, I want to protest, it’s not like that. All any artist wants is to be someone else’s muse instead of just a creator all the time.
When it finally happens, I want to let myself say yes so badly. I want to surrender my big city dream and choose the small town because it means being with him. The concept of us was born from suburban daydreams anyway, our backs melded with my baked driveway while plucking teardrop stars from the Milky Way, Andromeda, Orion. I chose his best friend the first time around, but that never mattered. We laugh through six years of shared pickup truck rides and unannounced “are–you–home” drivebys, all our wanting long collapsed into blissful pretend. So yes, choosing him is a mantra I recognize with my eyes closed, even if home is a moving target in a state small enough to be forgotten.
I tell him I fear abandonment like an inheritance carved into my psyche, that the aching, low-pitched drone in my lungs will never go away. “Let me try,” he begs.
Everything is possible in the earth–song of my imagination. For 48 hours, our metropolis future sprawls out like a blueprint sketched on my palm. Mixed–race New Year’s Eve parties, holding each other when we think no one is looking, a gentle secret silvery and formless passing between us. Time chases, but we stay the same. Our brownstone in suburban Vermont, a five–minute drive from our families in Montpelier, Vt., but distant enough to call something our own. Years of Friday evenings where our fathers clink wine glasses, laughing that I finally chose him back. Saffron sunset in hues without language, our quiet joy dangling out of windowsills and into hyacinth beds, and I never want for anything more.
This man writes fanfiction about me, and I so badly want to want him back. I know I’m the bad guy, but let me protest that I tried. I tried to choose the high school sweetheart who mapped my acne scars and gnawed reticence into constellations. Loved every version of me when I didn’t, when I shrank myself smaller than statehood, a blip of teenage oblivion. Before we were “us,” we were still only me, 12, and him, 13, but one of us was always lagging behind the other, barely out of sync. One of us always searching for something bigger.
He leaves home first, but I choose not to return. As our calendars fill with everything but each other, sleet pierces my bloodstream, runs down my sides cold. So I cleave myself from fantasy, lurch back to this festering reality. I tell him the truth: I have always wanted something greater than home. In this life, my soul sledgehammers city sidewalks and heaves down skyscraper ambition despite my asthma. The yawning maw of urban possibility is an infection I can’t relinquish, drunk on the chase of something more temporal than Main Street and Montpelier Church and the illusion where we got married at 22 and never looked back.
In response, he snorts. “Don’t worry. I won’t wait around for you anymore.” Or something like that. The phone line glitches in and out while he drives back to Vermont suburbia, which wraps its familiar arms around him. “But I’ll always love you.” I try to formulate a response of equal emotional caliber, but really, I know that “always” is too big a promise to make, especially to someone more than friend but less than lover. I want to tell him I’m sorry. You were always too close to home, always more fiction than material.
My present is much less forgiving. My body in its first urban snowfall, sprawled out like the vast city I lose myself in, night spurting out jagged and red. A different boy asks if this is my first time; I lie and say no because I want him to want me. He still doesn’t. “I never loved her,” he tells his new girlfriend, young with sprightly eyes, full moon dew and willing to give him everything I wasn’t.
Whether another six years later or now, this becoming is the only truth I know about myself: a cigarette clasped between my fingers instead of a ring, a backless dress framing the windowsill with frigid evening, the stench of absence rendering my lips green. All the times I begged for love, just to flee when it arrived shaped like my best friend. In this life, I’d finally been chosen, but walked away. What then? What do I tell myself to keep loving? What if all my choices lead me back to this loneliness? What if I’d just settled for the simple life, surrendered small freedoms now, if it meant that I could hold this future with both hands and know that, finally, it is more real than imagination?
