It’s the Monday after Thanksgiving in 2022. I’m downstairs in the living room of my parent’s house, sipping coffee, talking to my mom about my future plans. I’m going to buy a dog soon. I’m going to be moving out of my apartment soon. I’m starting a new job soon. There’s no one on my mind currently or maybe there’s one person that comes in and out of focus, but it must not be important if I can’t remember if I thought about them this morning.
I climb the stairs to my old bedroom, and I see a name pop up on my phone.
It’s September 7, 2014. I’ve just turned 19, and I’m coming back to campus from a long night of parties in Boston. I was woken up early in the morning by someone playing what would become my favorite song and favorite artist for the next seven years. After easing into the day, I spend the morning drinking coffee from a plastic cup and eating a croissant from a white porcelain plate from a pristine, lightly furnished cafe in Cambridge. The festivities fade away as the idea of Sunday “to-dos” creep in, but I still feel invincible as my sister drives me back to campus. It was only a few hours before that I was riding all over the city in a convertible with my hands reaching up at the night sky, living these idealistic, romanticized snippets of life that would be included in a highlights reel of my life that I’d want to see one last time before I die.
Adrenaline is pumping through me from doing all of the things last night that I shouldn’t have been doing. But I’m 19. This is the time to live!It won’t catch up to me until I’m, like, 23 and old and married. That’s when life slows down.
I’ve been exchanging messages with this boy from my school that I think is cute. Nothing with too much gravity attached to it. I’m slightly passive, but that’s how I always start off. It’s the age of Tinder and I’m seeing what kind of people are at the school I just transferred to. I can’t remember much of our conversation except that he suggests that we meet each other today. I agree.
Hours later, I go down the eight floors to greet him in the lobby of my dorm. The front doors are heavy as I push them open, feeling the air conditioner mess up my straightened hair. I feel attractive in my see-through black shirt and short shorts, still embracing the youthful high and indestructible confidence that a new year of life brings.
I look around and my stomach drops as soon as I see him waiting for me. He looks at me, his eyes sweet, nervous, friendly. I try to stay cool as I say, “You must be…”. I completely forget his name because I am so hyper-aware of how attractive he is. More attractive than I had originally planned for. His presence exudes warmth. He stands up, towering over me as he laughs, “Yeah, that’s me.”
We walk outside into the warm September air as we begin our first walk in a series of long walks and endless adventures that would haunt me for a long time. We don’t talk about anything significant that night, but I have the best time with him. The conversation flows effortlessly. No one hijacks the conversation, but still, he makes me feel nervous the more the night progresses. I can’t even look at him, but I steal glances as he makes me laugh.
A few days later, I make my way over to his dorm to meet him for lunch; I’m listening to my new favorite song on my I-pod as I get closer and closer to the building. Did we hug? Did I smile? Did I stop smiling? Lunch turns into him showing me a place down by the water, which turns into us walking on a bridge, which turns into me climbing onto rocks, which turns into him joking about my choice of shoes. I gingerly walk on the tips of the rocks that poke out of the water. I look to where he is about fifty feet ahead of me. I’m not sure what he’s doing, but he faces me before taking his phone out. I look down at my shoes, smiling to myself thinking about the nickname he gave them. Silly shoes. I wiggle my toes before I look back up to see him making his way towards me. He extends his hand, and on the screen of his phone is a photo of me. There I am on his screen, balancing on a rock wearing a short, red summer dress that stands out against the backdrop of the jagged dark rocks and whites of the water crashing to the left of me. With those silly shoes.
It’s my turn to show him my favorite place on campus. I choose an old white brick building where the musty smell of history lives. We walk down one of the three brick pathways before we climb the stone stairs and open the impossibly heavy wooden doors. I repeat these steps every day of the school week when I go to my Art History class and my French class. At this time of night, the building is quiet, just like I picture how it’s meant to be. It should be left alone in peace, while the stacks of books collect dust. He lets me roam in silent solitude; he keeps me with his quiet company around the empty building, searching for nothing, before we step outside into the evening sky. Our silent sophistication melts away as we play an immature game of hide-and-seek. I hide behind a wall, but he quickly finds me, peeking and smiling at me from over the top of the wall. I laugh so hard, becoming more and more severely attracted to his sense of humor. Time passes. The sun hides, and the moon finds us in the dark. God, I liked him.
Everything felt like it was building up to this crescendo: the next night. Tonight we find ourselves sharing another night sky outside the church that I live by, and tonight he won’t stop looking at me. I laugh even harder tonight. I get even more nervous tonight. He likes how he can make me laugh so hard, and he describes my body language when I laugh. No one ever has come close to describing it the way he did because I don’t know if many people have made me laugh like that. We continue our adventure in the night, and during this adventure he realizes how ticklish I am. He pokes my side, and I yelp out in laughter. So we continue this disgustingly youthful, flirtatious pattern. He pokes. I laugh, swatting him away. He pokes. I laugh and squirm. He pokes. I laugh and lean in. He pokes and wraps his arms around me. I’m beaming from happiness. We become more playful as I climb onto the edge of a railing overlooking the water; he comes up behind me, placing his hands gently but confidently around my waist. I stretch out my arms, and suddenly we’re a moment in a movie that is overplayed by people our age. We don’t care. I don’t care. I just want that moment with him.
That September night was the last night that we would have together for a long time. We sat close. We watched the city lights mingle with the wind and dance with the late summer stars. Our conversation came to a natural silence after his arm provided my body with protection from the harmless breeze. I didn’t want the night to end. I wished so hard on any plane, UFO, shooting star, shimmer of light pollution that I could find in the sky that it wouldn’t, and I truly believed—that if shiny objects I wished on failed me, he couldn’t. I let my head fall heavy against him. I fell so hard.
It’s 2022. I stare at his name on my phone. I’m annoyed because I didn’t think I’d ever hear from him. He was a memory that I left on a summer morning in 2017, when he left me crying in the rain. What are we doing? What’s going to happen if I respond? An agonizing thirty minutes go by until I realize I’m still curious about him.
“How was your Thanksgiving?”
I try to think up a response that sounds casual, and before I know it we’re talking.
“Do you still sing?”
“I’m getting back into it.” The only reason I got back into it in college was because I wrote a song about him and a bridge we walked across many times.
“Where are you living?”
“What do you do now?”
I carry on with my life when our conversation fades, but his name appears again when he responds to a picture of me with my second grade milk carton penguin, and I find the courage to ask, “What have the years done to you?”
He tells me, but I don’t listen to what he says. I observe how he speaks. The last time I saw him in person was at a house party when I was 21. We were both young, chaotic, investing in things that didn’t matter. I was extremely narcissistic, trying to live up to a version of myself that was rooted in ego and pride. I remember how he looked in his early twenties, but I see him in a wedding photo from last month. The years have aged him, but they have also calmed him. I notice he doesn’t talk or ask about things that we had used to ask right away. We don’t ask them at all this time.
He now sees my name pop up on his phone. Another conversation starts, and soon enough we’re riffing off of each other’s jokes, just like we had used to.
“How was your show? I’m glad you still sing. I always thought it was so cool that you did.”
I smile subtly, missing the moments I won’t ever get to have with him.
It’s 2014, and his message was the first message I answered in the morning.
It’s 2015, and his message was the first message I’d answer.
It’s 2016 and..then it’s
2017
2018
2019
2020
2022, and his message was the first message I answered this morning.
I appreciate how time changes people.
I enjoy my chaotic energy less and less, and I gravitate towards the people who are quieter, calmer, who speak to me because they are curious about the details that make me who I am. I am attracted to the people that provide me with the peace that I have spent the last few years finding in nature, in myself, in sound, in family. He feels calm and he makes me feel calm this time around, but I’ll never know to what extent that statement is true. I’ll never experience him that way; I’ve accepted it a long time ago.
As I’ve gotten older, I have felt so depressed about what I was giving and accepting as a mature expression of love or affection. I stopped feeling whisked away. I stopped reaching out my hands to see if I could touch the stars. I stopped leaning back when I was in a laughing fit. I stopped wishing on any objects in the sky because I stopped believing that they had the power to prevent someone from leaving.
Then a name popped up on my phone.
With the change in our conversation, change in our energy, and our mutual boundaries in the exchange of conversation, he makes me smile now because I no longer remember him as the person who left me standing in the rain. Everything that I’m drawn to about him now stirs up in me all of those good memories and nostalgic feelings that I had locked away in a journal entry in 2014.
For a brief moment, I felt like I was that 19-year old girl, fresh from New York. I was that girl who was giggling while hiding behind a wall, ordering my favorite flavor of ice cream which happened to be his too, sidestepping sharp rocks in a short, red dress, struggling to swallow my cranberry juice in a fit of laughter, naively talking about what life would be like when we’re 25, believing in the possibilities of tomorrrows and the magic of stars settling down on the blanket of the night skies.
Thank you for bringing that back.
Recommended for listening while reading: “Killed a Man (Wide Open Road Mix) by Kita Alexander