The Small, Hard Thing

There are three photographs of me from that winter. In one, I am laughing with my mouth open too wide, like the girl in the picture doesn’t know what waits for her in July. In another, your hand is at the base of my spine, casual as weather. The third was taken after. Though no one looking at it would know that. Everyone always says that: "You look so happy here." I threw away the blue dress before I learned how to forgive myself for buying it. That came years later, in the produce aisle, holding peaches too soft to survive the drive home. Funny— I remembered your birthday for seven consecutive years and forgot my own phone number twice. The worst part wasn’t the leaving. No. It was how long I continued introducing you in stories after you were gone. Like muscle memory. Like a country still printing maps with a vanished city. In May, before any damage had technically occurred, my mother asked me over for coffee and whether I trusted you.

I answered too quickly. That should count as foreshadowing, but life is crueler than novels. It only becomes symbolism afterward. Once, in a hotel room in Chicago, I woke up furious with you for something you hadn’t done yet. I almost called home. Instead, I watched snow collect on the fire escape outside the window until morning made everything look forgivable. There’s the trick of it. You told me I was dramatic the night I cried in your parked car. But I wasn’t crying because of what you said. I was crying because suddenly I could see the entire relationship at once— the ending already sitting inside the beginning like a pearl inside an oyster. Small. Hard. Waiting. If I could relive one moment, it would not be our first kiss. It would be the second before it. The air smelled like rain on concrete. Someone upstairs was playing music too loudly. I remember thinking: this is the last version of me who belongs only to herself. Years later, someone else will love me gently. I am telling you this now because chronology is overrated, because healing does not arrive in order, because sometimes the future needs to place a hand on the past and say, "look." "You survived him." And still— last week, I passed a man on the street wearing your cologne. For six entire seconds, I became nineteen again. Not metaphorically. Cell by cell. Then the crosswalk changed. A bus sighed against the curb. Some kid nearby dropped a carton of strawberries, and they rolled everywhere, bright as little alarms. By then, I was thirty. Again.