Once this notion implanted itself in her head, Alice could not shake it. When they kissed, she couldn’t feel Taylor gently biting her lower lip because she was distracted by the fact that for all she knew this could be their last kiss. As he slipped his fingers between hers when they crossed the street, she would remind herself not to get too comfortable. He could get hit by a bus right now, with their hands entwined. That fear kept her staring at the ceiling all night even as Taylor slept deeply beside her. She’d listen to the steady rise and fall of his breath, waiting for it to stop. It didn’t help to point out to herself that the possibility of a healthy twenty-seven-year-old man dying in his sleep was exceedingly low. There were a million other ways to lose a person. His childhood friends, whom she’d been avoiding meeting, could dislike her. Or they could like her too much. His parents could decide she wasn’t good enough for him. Or that she believed she was too good for him. She could lose her temper too easily or not be wild enough in bed and eventually he’d grow bored. She could start snoring or she could get after him for snoring, and he would decide that if they weren’t compatible in sleep, they could never be compatible in waking life. These thoughts were the only ones that distracted her from the anxieties of blinding a hypothetical person on her med school exams, which wasn’t exactly a comfort. She found herself constantly worried until she couldn’t handle it anymore, med school or the relationship, so she quit them both.
After Taylor she dated Patrick, Bode, then Sebastian. The trajectory was the same even as the men were very different. As soon as the pain localized in her chest, she knew the end was imminent. With Sebastian, she’d wound up in her childhood bedroom with her mother administering sleeping pills because she’d been up for four straight nights, worrying not as much about him dying—he was of sturdy Eastern European stock—as what would happen when she woke up, if he would smell her morning breath, see her unruly morning hair, and realize that she was normal. Flawed. Wrong for him. As the fatigue set in, she became convinced that they’d be finished the second she drifted to sleep, so she pinched her cheeks, and clawed at her palms, forcing herself to stay awake until sleep was no longer a possibility and neither was the relationship.
With Patrick, she was so nervous that she spent three days without drinking water before she ended up with a stomachache from too much Gatorade when she tried to catch up on electrolytes. And with Bode, oh Bode, she’d forgotten the sound of her own voice, having grown mute for fear of saying the wrong thing. When she finally braved a sentence, her voice came out someone else’s. After that, after insomnia, dehydration, and voicelessness, she decided enough was enough. She couldn’t keep her body from its natural panic, its automatic aversion to love. It was easier to avoid romantic entanglements altogether since they would always end, even if Alice didn’t manage to mess a good thing up.
Once she decided that love, like the field of medicine, was not for her, her entire body could relax. She remembered how much she liked herself when she wasn’t consumed with wondering if someone else liked her enough. This self-love seemed healthier and more fulfilling than any affirmation she could get from a partner. As for the more physical aspects of a relationship, well, that was lust. Alice was fine with lust, so long as it ran clear of love.
Throughout her twenties, she taught herself to separate the physical from the emotional, which turned out not to be difficult if she chose the right partners. She began to identify the personality traits of those who would want more from her than she was prepared to give, those she in turn might want more from, the men who were too interested in her childhood or her life goals, those who told her they felt like they’d known her their entire lives. Others who were shy or wounded, whom she found herself wanting to fix. The men she pursued instead didn’t have to be assholes or players, simply individuals with whom she didn’t share that uncontrollable spark, that deeper connection. Even then, she had a fail-proof routine for keeping them at a distance. She never invited these men to her home, never stayed the night at theirs. If she decided she wanted to see them again, she always took their numbers, always texted, never called, met them for drinks, not meals, somewhere close to their homes.
Now, at thirty-two, Alice still believed in love—just for other people. Never for herself. Some people do not have the discipline to train to be a concert pianist. Others do not have the bravery to be a stunt person. Alice simply did not have the constitution for love.
After a few weeks, Gabby had not in fact found someone new. She was committed to mourning her relationship with Brian for as long as it took, which was proving to be a considerable amount of time. Alice needed to do something to shake Gabby, to make her understand how strong she was, how much love awaited her, how much love she had to give. She considered buying Gabby a collection of Yeats poems, but she wasn’t trying to make her best friend even more depressed. Jane Austen felt too predictable, and besides, those were love stories Gabby had already memorized. No, Gabby needed something uniquely hers that would make her feel seen. So, as she continued to pair periods of isolation with heavy drinking sessions and public crying jags, Alice decided to write her best friend a letter.
Through the years, Alice and Gabby had established a tradition of writing to each other. In grade school, they passed notes. Rather, Gabby wrote little quips about the teacher’s hair or whichever boy she liked, while Alice chided her, covertly hiding the notes for fear of getting caught. In eighth grade, after Alice’s father died, she found among the cards of benign sympathies a tome from Gabby, complete with every kind and funny thing she remembered about Alice’s father. In turn, Alice wrote to Gabby about all the ways she missed him, all the things she never wanted to forget. They never discussed these letters. Instead, throughout high school, they became each other’s diary, chronicling their anxieties and grievances, their most personal thoughts. Knowing that their words were being read, that they weren’t hidden in a drawer, deemed private and somehow shameful, made their feelings matter. It helped them trust their perspectives—Gabby quickly became a hopeless romantic while Alice hardened into something of a skeptic. In college, when their peers were embracing the ease and novelty of email, they sent pages of handwritten confessions by post. Gabby’s letters always smelled like honeysuckle and jasmine, as though she sprayed the pages before she enclosed them in the envelope. Alice did not know what her letters smelled like. She didn’t have a signature scent, at least not one that derived from a bottle. Still, she assumed her letters smelled like her, that their olfactory qualities comforted her best friend as much as her familiar handwriting. In those letters, they told each other everything from the mundane details of their classes, the small cruelties of cafeteria food, and the peculiar habits of their roommates to the travails of love and heartbreak. At the time, Alice was still trying to date. This was before she realized she was not prepared for the stress of pairing yourself with another.
As Alice biked home from a shift one day, making a mental list of all the things she wanted to tell her best friend about how amazing she was, how she deserved someone better than Brian, an image materialized so forcefully in her mind that it knocked her off balance. Her knee contacted the ground first, sending a shooting pain up her right leg. As she rubbed it, the vision crystalized in her mind, sharp and Technicolor. A red hummingbird.
When at last the pain subsided, she stood and walked her bike the remaining blocks home, confused by what had just happened to her. Her body buzzed with displaced energy from the fall, persisting as she locked up her bike, opened her front door, and settled before her computer to fill the screen with all the things she loved about her best friend. Except when her fingers found the keys, they did not writeMy dearest Gabby. Instead she began to describe the hummingbird, whose wings shed crimson hearts every time they fluttered, faster than a heartbeat. What followed from there was not a letter but a story.
Everywhere this hummingbird went it left a trail of love. Soon people were following it down State Street to the wharf. As they neared the Pacific, the crowd grew thousands deep, hundreds thick, like a protest. It was a love protest. A love march. A love pilgrimage. And when the hummingbird finally reached the ocean, it flew over the waves, carpeting them in red confetti hearts. All the people, all those love pilgrims, turned to the side to see if anyone else had witnessed the hummingbird too, and when their eyes locked with the person beside them, they found immediate and eternal love.
The letters to Gabby notwithstanding, Alice was not a writer. She’d never aspired to pen the next great American novel, to win a Pulitzer for exposing the nefarious dealings of political parties. Alice was not historically a finisher either. In addition to changing her undergraduate major four times and dropping out of medical school, she abandoned hobbies as quickly as she pursued them. Tennis. Beach volleyball, which despite her height she lacked the coordination for. Spanish, although Gabby’s mother insisted on speaking the romance language to her. Pottery, because she found the teacher too attractive to be around. Knitting, gardening, running, even most televisions shows. In fact, the only thing Alice was certain to finish was a book. She never started reading a novel without seeing it through. Every story had some essential truth she could glean from it, some kernel of wisdom that made life a little brighter. But anything besides a book? She couldn’t even finish a meal without leaving a few bites. In short, it was as surprising that Alice had finished the story for Gabby as it was that she’d decided to write it in the first place.
It was a silly story, that hummingbird tale, but it left Alice with the tingling sensation of ice-cold air-conditioning on a sweat-drenched day. Even though she wasn’t a writer or a finisher, Alice knew she’d finished writing something special, twelve pages of solid gold. She just knew. Before she could second-guess herself, she put it in an envelope, wroteGbbyon the front, with a heart for thealike Gabby used to write her name in middle school, and left the story in her best friend’s mailbox, hoping to cheer her up.
After that, Alice didn’t see Gabby for two weeks. She figured Gabby was back in an isolation stage, which she would follow up with binge drinking before too long. Certainly her friend’s silence couldn’t have anything to do with Alice’s story. Gabby had likely discarded the envelope in the bowl by her front door where it was destined to remain unopened. Surely the silence could not be because Gabby had met someone, since she was so committed to being heartbroken.
When Gabby at last emerged from her period of silence, she recounted the happenings of her last two weeks breathlessly over margaritas. No more blue ladies for her. No more crusted tears on pillowcases, no more untouched dinners. She attacked their order of guacamole, saying over a mouthful of avocado and red onion, “Your story. It worked.”
“What do you mean it worked?” Alice scooped as much guacamole as she could onto her chip. On the best of days, she worried about getting her fair share of a communal dish, which was why she didn’t share with anyone other than Gabby and her mother, who were both conscious of and accommodating to this hang-up. Usually, anyway. Not today. Not this bowl of guacamole. At least Alice hadn’t agreed to share an entrée with Gabby too.
“I was reading your story at that French place I like on Arlington, the one with the really good croque madame?” Gabby said as she mined a tomato from the guacamole. “It was really a stupid story.”
Alice winced. She would be the first to admit the story was dumb, though it didn’t feel great to have that fact confirmed by someone else.
“But it got me laughing. When the hummingbird turned the ocean red with love, it was just too silly, too on the nose, but it worked.”
“I still don’t understand,” Alice said with a tinge of annoyance, miffed by Gabby’s criticism of her story. “What do you mean itworked?”
“There was this guy sitting next to me. Oliver.” She spoke his name like it was made of silk. “He heard me laughing, and he said, ‘Anything that gets a reaction like that must be pretty good.’ He’s a stand-up comedian. I tried to explain to him that it wasn’t actually funny, definitely not something that would garner a laugh at a comedy club, not that I’d ever been to a comedy club, and he said it was a crime I’d never seen stand-up and maybe he’d take me sometime. Then sometime became the following night, and we haven’t stopped going out since.” Gabby blushed. “Well, we occasionally stay in.”
“Gabby!” Alice exclaimed, pretending to be scandalized.
“Oh, Alice, I’m in deep this time.”
In deep, as though love was an endless pool to drown in.
The language we use to describe love never ceased to amaze Alice. Our crushes, our flings, our old flames. The way we fall. The way we break. The way we are struck, and that’s supposed to be a good thing. Gabby was in deep, and instead of reaching to pull her out, Alice had apparently pushed her in.
“I trust him. I trust this feeling. It’s just, well, it’s easy. It was never easy with Brian.”
Easy was good? Weren’t we supposed to want someone who challenged us? Wasn’t the whole point that the person pushed us to be a better version of ourselves? That we in turn pushed them? Looking at Gabby’s face, the way she struggled not to smile, Alice could see that easy was indeed good. At least for the moment. With Gabby’s track record, Alice was not inclined to assume this prelude would last, regardless of whether her story played a role in it.
“I’m really happy for you.” Alice’s voice faltered. Gabby was too giddy to notice.
“Here’s the thing.” Gabby pounded on the table for effect. “Don’t be mad, but I may have given your story to Maria.”
“Why would you do that?” Alice was more embarrassed than angry. As Gabby said, it really was a stupid story, and her sister, Maria, was the smartest person they both knew. Smart as in PhD in chemical engineering, calculus in seventh grade. Like many brainy people, she wasn’t known for her sense of humor.
