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Somehow we have passed so many years without even celebrating each other’s birthdays, but I want things to be different this year. I thought a lot about what you would want. And in trying to remember what you love, I went through my diary, the one I kept hidden under lock and key in my room, the records I’d kept of you. I was reminded of how you said that learning to be honest was the best thing that had happened to you this year, and so I thought, Okay. Maybe I’ll be honest, too, for you.
Do you remember that day on the balcony, the night I won Rookie of the Year? How the world felt so small beneath us, small enough for me to hold in the cusp of my hand. Yet somehow I could feel you slipping through my fingers, like sand in an hourglass. I tried to cup my hands, just to catch whatever that was left, but what a futile effort it was, for you are larger than life itself. You could never have fit into my hands, for you were not mine then. I let the alcohol in my veins convince myself that I had you, if I wanted to, but back then, between you and the rest of the world, fear was the largest, most inconsolable thing to exist.
(Not anymore, because now, I have you.)
Sometimes I think of the times you’ve blown me in the showers. (Wow, that was embarrassing to write out…) Not because it makes me horny or whatever (okay, honestly, maybe) but because I used to think I would hate it. Everything is too much—the steam puffing up the room, the water running down the back of my neck, my spine; the fear that one of us will slip and fall and die a cruel death, the fear of having to tell the paramedics why on fucking Earth we were both in the showers together in the first place.
Those thoughts don’t come to me when you drop down to your knees, though. They’re enclosed, sealed into the tiles of the walls when you reach out a hand to place on my knee, steadying me, fingers pruny from the water. A flaring heat against the water, turned lukewarm from how long we would spend kissing underneath the showerhead, like a scene from a melodrama where the characters share a grand kiss in the rain—the kind of drama you insist you don’t like but that you save the episodes of to watch later (don’t think for a second I didn’t notice, Mr Soap Opera Enjoyer).
That evening in Tampa Bay, as we were looking out at the sunset, I couldn’t stop looking at you. How the last rays casted shadows over your face, tainting your curls an amber hue. Gold specks in your hazel eyes. Moles like a constellation of stars glimmering along your skin.
I was terrified of what you would say when I exposed the truth that had been hanging between us: that there was something so much more to us than we’d deluded ourselves to believe. I was terrified that you would walk out the door, that this snapshot of you in the afterglow was the last memory I’d have of you.
It is a relief to know, then, that the truth, as harsh as it is, can sometimes soften its blows in the name of love. But even if it had knocked me down to the ground, I know I would’ve come back up to my feet anyway, again and again and again, because I love you. Isn’t that the simplest truth of all?
We were lazing around in bed—your bed—when you told me the first time you ever put on ice skates. I watched the lines form on your forehead as you tried to latch onto the right words, like shoving each sentence mechanically through a translator, in the hopes that it would come out the other side anew. I watched intently, perhaps too intently, because you turned to me then and let out a snort. I am saying nonsense, yes?
No, you’re not. Keep going.
Liar.
I swear I’m not lying!
You huffed, but there was a smile you kept imprisoned behind your teeth. I knew that then; I know it better now, the kind of half-bitten smile when you are amused by my words, my presence, no matter how much you lament about how boring I am.
Even though you were skeptical of my proclamations, you continued with your story. An arm snuck around my shoulder, a finger tracing slow circles there. You talked about your mother, how she insisted on you wearing your elbow pads, how she helped you to your feet. A rock you leaned on, an anchor to the deep blue sea. You talked and talked until your throat scraped against the syllables, coarse around the edges, not from overuse but from the tears clogging the pipeways. I kissed your tears, salt and grief sinking into my teeth, and I promised you that I would let you talk about her for forever if it beckoned me into the life I didn’t know before you.
When we were at the cottage the first time, I remembered the campfire I’d built. I thought it was nice. You called it boring, but I saw how you looked at my eyes, how you looked into the reflection of the flames within my irises. I know that because that is what I saw in you, too: a flame that had spread over the course of months and years, until it became this inextinguishable, all-consuming thing. Every nerve of mine has been burned alive by the thought of you, powdered ash blown to wherever the winds would now take me.
When you laid your head in my lap, your eyes were watery, glistening. I didn’t say anything then, just let ourselves melt into each other from the heat trapped in the spaces between our bodies. Words weren’t needed for the flame I held for you, and you for me.
That drive from the cottage back to the airport after my parents found out about me—about us—was perhaps one of the hardest days of my life. It felt like the road went on for miles and for none at the exact same time. How much I wanted for it to never end, for if it did, it would feel like being we were being ripped out of the pages of a fairytale novel. Torn out from the joys that came with the happily ever after’s. Deprived of a reality where I could have you and you could have me and we could be us.
You had placed a hand on my knee, a tear brimming your left eye as you squeezed the bone beneath your palm. I know you were trying to console me as much as you were for yourself. That’s the warmest part of it all—that you had me and I had you, that we had each other no matter what lay before us. That we could flip the page, start a chapter anew. One day, maybe we’ll write a book about it or two. Get it adapted into a movie, or better, one of those melodramas you adore. Not for the fame, but for the version of us that could have lived from the beginning of it all.
Wouldn’t that be a story for the ages?