It soothed her.
Not by erasing what happened, but by placing it where it belonged.
With him.
With his fear. His immaturity. His inability to be responsible.
As I read, I felt a strange sense of distance open up inside me. As if the story unfolding on the page had happened to someone else entirely.
Time had done that.
Age had done that.
I was not that girl anymore.
I could see now what I had been too young and too in love to recognize then. The way he had floated through life, buoyed by charm and forgiveness. The way responsibility slid off him without sticking. The way he loved me sincerely but without the weight that love sometimes requires.
He had been a dumb kid.
So, had I.
We had been standing on the edge of something enormous, asking ourselves to be people we had not yet grown into.
I thought of the man he was now. The man sitting across from me, waiting without expectation, his hands folded tightly in his lap as if bracing for impact.
I did not see the boy I had loved in him anymore.
Not entirely.
That realization did not frighten me the way it once would have.
Maybe all we had needed was time.
Time to grow. Time to fail. Time to become separate people instead of clinging to the shape we had formed too early.
The thought surprised me with its gentleness.
I lowered the pages and closed my eyes for a moment.
A memory rose unbidden.
How stupid of me to think I could tie the beautiful boy who was as free as I was bound.
But I had been in love of such magnitude that nothing could have kept me from him. Not my mother. Not the town. Not the quiet warnings disguised as concern.
Because he had been mine.
And I had been his.
I would have let everyone call me a fool. I would have paid any price to be with him. I would have bled myself dry if it meant keeping us intact.
He had been my first love.
My only love.
And when he left, I had been forced to build a story that allowed me to survive.
In that story, he had never really loved me. He must have lied when he called me the love of his life. He must have meant it less than I did.
