“If you rewrite your life, may I still play a part?”
I kind of had no choice but to fall in love with you. You’ve always been here. I’m not exaggerating when I say I do not know what life is meant to be without you. You know parts of me I laid to rest, but you’re not surprised when they resurface, clawing their way out of the grave. We don’t talk much now, haven’t in a long time, and yet we still talk too much. We refuse to hang up the phone, even though your phone died from low battery and we’ve been talking for three hours about people we no longer know. You laugh and it’s like we’re back in my parents’ basement, huddled together on the air mattress, making funny faces and tickling each other until we can’t breathe. When you frown, I still see that line between your eyes, the one that used to appear when you did physics homework. Your face is a map of places I’ve been and people I used to be, and it is the one place on earth where I feel at home without trying. How do I separate me from you if you’ve always been there?
After a long day of chlorine, our feet ragged from concrete heat, we scrambled into the backseat of your mom’s minivan. Our suits are soaked through, drying in patches like asphalt after a rainy day, and we lay down our towels beneath us, as if it will keep the seats dry. The air is hot and muggy in the car, suffocating like a warm blanket just out of the dryer, and for a moment, it feels perfect. Then your mom turns up the A/C and we recline the seat so that both of us are practically horizontal, the cool air rustling our hair until we start to shiver. There’s some song playing on the radio, but it’s not important. My body feels heavy, weighed down by the radiation of the sun and a few hundred calories of sugary snacks. Next to me, your hair is splayed out around your face and you’re turned towards me just slightly. I see the last eight years of my life in your cheeks, in your eyelashes, in your chin. I want to hold on to whatever this is and never let go, but I know by the time we get home it will fade away like the summer sun. You and I don’t say anything, nobody in the car does. We just sit together and watch the cornfields roll by as our eyelids flutter closed.
I kind of had no choice but to fall in love with you. I could not get you out of my head. I’d see you on the bus, your robin’s egg blue backpack clutched to your chest, chattering on and on about things I couldn’t hear since my headphones were jammed into my ears. Through the guitar riffs and piano melodies I saw your lips move and I thought, She is someone I should know. But back then you felt unreachable, like I was Pluto and you were the Sun. So when you sat down next to me, two partners writing each other’s full names like an enrollment form, I felt like I had been plucked from obscurity. The angel hath smiled upon me, god bless her soul, and I worshipped at her feet. You lent me your favorite book and it felt like communion, like the breaking of bread. Your blood, sweat, and tears were a covenant that would baptize me into new life. If I just drank enough of you, maybe I would feel like I deserved you. I sometimes still feel like I’m not nearly enough to deserve you.
There’s an unspoken agreement between small-town citizens and the universe: if you find a drive-in eatery, you are required to stop in to order a milkshake. (Or a coke float. Or mozzarella sticks.) No one knows why diners and drive-ins (and dives) are so important to the small-town locale, but many believe that it’s the best place to share secrets. There’s a liminal space born between the neon lights and grease that lends itself to laughter and tears. You can find god in the whipped cream and in the eyes of your best friend. So when we pass by the only drive-in in town, we oblige. We sit in my new car and slurp our frosted drinks and spend way too long coming up with a backstory for the novel we’ll never write. The summer is fleeting, disappearing more with every sunrise, but this moment lasts as long as a Cook-Out shake. (Specifically an oreo flavored one that you’ve been patiently waiting all day for, forgetting that it will take approximately one (1) ice age for the damn thing to thaw.) We keep pretending like this is our swan song, our coming of age movie, our teenage dream, but we’re almost done being teenagers. We’re almost done with our shakes. But I guess I got what I came for because when I look at you, I see all the secrets of the universe reflected back at me.
I kind of had no choice but to fall in love with you. We were pushed together, two stars colliding in orbit, forced to save each other as our gravity imploded. You weren’t just another person I could talk to, you were the only person who was with me during the crash. We held hands in the wreckage, our heartbeats screaming in our ears, overwhelmed and underfed, and nobody seemed to know what to do with us. We brought each other back to life, and I always worried that I would have to give you up, make the sacrifice to let you go, save you one last time by saving you from myself. But you never let go. You never let me.
In all honesty, I’m not sure how we ended up here. I’ve never been one to get carried away by the crowd, but I think when I’m with you I could be persuaded to do just about anything. It’s the fucking fourth of July, and somehow we are in a packed bar standing next to people I barely know and there is a cosmopolitan in my hand. I don’t even know what’s in a cosmopolitan. (I still don’t.) You are next to me, a shooting star screaming through the darkest night, and neither of us knows how our hearts will break in the years to come. We are entering the valley of the shadow of death, and the red flags look green in the dim bar lights. A band that no one has ever heard of and will never hear again is singing, “Country roads, take me home, to the place, I belong…” and we are younger than we’ve ever been even though I just turned twenty-six. I’m terrified that this moment will end, but I’m more terrified that we will stay here for too long. I don’t know how to know you, but I know I want to try. I take another sip of my drink, feeling immortal in a way that I never thought was possible, and for just a second, I wonder if this is how everyone feels when they get drunk, if this is why so many people drown themselves day after day. I think I’d be willing to drown myself to see you laugh.