Part of Your World

There’s something more final than forever. It’s never. Never is infinite.

Love follows you. It goes where you go. It doesn’t know about social divides or distance or common sense. It doesn’t even stop when the person you love dies. It does what it wants.

“You have to wear a stolen hoodie,” I said.

“Otherwise it’s just another senseless crime?”

“Don’t let them decide the life you’re going to live. You only get one.”

The words hung there between us. But I was too weak to pick them up.

I couldn’t talk to her about the stuff her ex probably did, I couldn’t make the money she made or buy her expensive gifts or take her on vacations.

But I could love her better than anyone ever could for the rest of her life. That, I knew. And if there was even a fraction of a chance that might be enough, I was going to take it.

I couldn’t develop a dependency on someone I couldn’t have long term.

Yeah, well, we’re all strong-ass women until a smoke alarm starts chirping at three a.m. on a high ceiling and there’s no one to hit it with a broom but you.

She smiled and I looked into her eyes and I saw everything. The rest of my life. I saw children and grandchildren and rocking chairs on the back porch of the house overlooking the river and two old people, dying on the same day because the world would never be cruel enough to make either one of us exist without the other.

My whole life I’d always felt a little fractured and scattered. Probably because it was always someone else trying to decide what I needed to be. I was a mosaic of someone else’s design where none of the fragments were put in the right place. And now I had finally put myself together and I recognized myself for the very first time.

There’s nothing in it for him except for her. Your parents hate her. His friends don’t get it. He had to move to Cambodia to be with her. Nothing about their being together is simple. So you know he’s with her because he really loves her. There’s no other explanation.” She looked back at my ceiling fan. “There’s something so peaceful about that, to just hit zero fucks about everything else but the person you love.” She paused. “I wish I had that.”