I thought, maybe him.
Maybe this.
Because that’s how you think when you’re the right amount of drunk, and hands and lips feel good, and someone is nice. Sometimes even when he’s not.
Someone is better than no one.
That’s what Isaac told me, because he doesn’t want me to leave like Theresa left, doesn’t want to have to make me leave. Would it be so bad to be with me? he asked, and he shouldn’t have, because it made him sound so young. He told me I could have a day to think about it, before I promise myself to him. He’s being generous, he says, because he likes me.
I always want to ask him whether he knows why his mother left him behind—whether he cares if she had a reason or not.
Not that having a reason is anything special. Everyone has a reason.
Would it be so bad? He won’t be thirteen forever, but he would be forever mine.
I thought I loved you all—even you, even for a night—and none of you saved me. Isaac saved me, so maybe he’s right that I should love him, that that’s how it should work.
He chose wisely this time, chose like he could see into me.
I am the girl who stays.
I am the girl who says yes, if you want.
Whatever you want.
As long as you don’t leave.
You didn’t have time to find that out about me, and you didn’t have time to test it. Or maybe you did. I can’t remember.
I might have told you the truth about me, all of me; you might have told me things you’d never told anyone, the secrets that made you who you were; we might have decided this night was the beginning of all things; you might have recited poetry and I might have recited the lyrics to all the C&C Music Factory songs I know, which is three, because we wanted to impress each other, and it might have worked; we might have done nothing more up there than kiss, like people in a boring movie, deciding, because Hollywood told us it was romantic, to take it slow, that why not, we had all the time in the world; we might have shaken the Earth. I don’t remember, like the next day I didn’t remember your name or where the office was, which was all fine, because I gave you my number; I thought I remembered that much, but then you never called, so one way or another, I was wrong.
I think you died when it first happened, went up in a blaze of light, fused with the thing that fell from the stars. I hope they’re right that it was beautiful.
Love,
Dear John,
This is what I would have written, if I had written anything. Dear John, it’s better this way. Dear John, it’s now or later, and we’re both better off if it’s now. Dear John, you won’t believe me, but I’m doing you a favor. Dear John, it’s okay if you fucking hate me forever because I hate you too. You told me you would never leave me, and now you’re leaving, so don’t try to blame me for leaving first. Dear John, don’t die, and maybe someday I’ll come back.
You can see why I didn’t leave a note.
Your mother took me aside. Not that first day in the hospital—there was too much crying for that, all that weeping and rending of clothes by your bedside. It’s not natural for a mother to lose a son, she kept saying, like it isn’t the most natural thing in the world, like that isn’t what mothers do every day, like that isn’t why she hated me, no matter what you claimed. After the first day, before the week had ended, before I went home to pack a bigger suitcase for you, because we’d moved past duffel bags, into some new category of traveler, long-term visa to the kingdom of the sick, somewhere in there, she took me aside. You can’t handle this, she told me. You think you can, but you can’t. She thought because her husband was dead, she knew what it took to handle things, and she thought, because you called her sometimes to bitch about me never doing the dishes, and because once, the time you thought I was sleeping with the coffee guy, you made the mistake of telling her why I didn’t speak to my family anymore and why I never went to college and what I did that year in LA to pay the rent, because of everything you let her imagine, she thought she knew me.
She said you can’t handle this, and if you can’t handle this it’s better if you go now than later. I can handle this, she said, and what she was actually saying was he’s mine. You’re nothing and he’s mine. She probably never told you that, and so you never knew it was partly her fault. She made me weak. A witch, like I always said. She put a curse on me and it came to pass.
I am the girl who stays—except somehow, I left.
I left before you could leave me, and I did the same thing with the world, left it out there alone to die, locked myself up tight, huddled around a radio and listened to it burn.
I don’t think about all the millions of people who died. I think about you, and whether your hair fell out like they said it would, and how you looked without it. What we would have done to kill time while they pumped poison into your veins, whether it would have been Scrabble or Trivial Pursuit, or if you finally would have guilted me into reading to you, even the crap poetry that you know I hate. How many more times would you have yelled at me for biting my cuticles? How many more times could I have crawled into your bed, snaked my hand around the wires and up your gown, massaged cold, veiny skin until you gasped thank you, yes, please, always polite, even in heat?
I will never leave you, Isaac said, and of course I’ve heard it before, but no one has ever meant it as much as he did. In this life and the next. You will never have to be alone. I promise.
He believes in his word. He believes in eternity. He won’t get bored or distracted. He won’t see the tohu va vohu at my center and realize I am a girl to be left, not loved. He will not leave. I believe he believes that, and I almost believe it’s true.
I promise forever, he said. Isn’t that what you want? Isn’t that what we all want?
Love me forever if you love me at all—fairy tale love, fairy tale happily ever afters, that’s what he believes in, as he should, because he’s still a child.
That’s what I’ve believed in all these years, too. That’s what I’ve wanted, and now that a child wants me to have it, I’m thinking it may be time to grow up.
Because it turns out everybody leaves. And not all leavings are the same.
Not all endings are the same.
Not all endings come at the wrong time, and when they do, maybe it doesn’t have to be anyone’s fault. Maybe you leaving didn’t mean I wasn’t enough.
Maybe I should have waited for you to leave me, instead of leaving you first.
Sometimes I wonder, what if. What if there was a miracle. A remission. A cure. What if you sat up five minutes after I walked out of there, you tore the oxygen off your face, strength flooding through your veins, tumors shriveling. What if you called out my name but I was already gone.
I let myself imagine you out there somewhere, and if you got one miracle, then why not two? Why not miracles enough to survive the skyfall and whatever came next? You could be leading a hardy band of survivors through the countryside, eating mushrooms and roasting goats, a Hollywood vision of man’s triumph over god and nature, ready for your close-up. You could be the tan one now, stronger than ever, muscles bulging through tattered clothes, hair lit blond the way it always got by the end of the summer, and if you are alive, if you are a miracle, then I know that’s how it would be. You wouldn’t be alone; you wouldn’t look for somewhere to hide, to lock yourself away and wait for the hard part to be over. You wouldn’t need a knife under your pillow, you wouldn’t be tempted to escape from the world. You would anchor yourself to it, raise a fist to the broken sky, shout this is mine and you can’t have it, and then you would go looking for survivors and make the world new. Maybe you would go looking for me. Maybe you are looking for me.