On everyone.
Even myself.
• • •
I buy the bus ticket at 2am on a Tuesday.
I couldn't handle any more of the texts and the voice memos and seeing Ro get farther and farther away from himself.
Just Ro, eight hundred miles away, needing me to know he loves me before the day ended. Every day.
• • •
Needing me to know because that’s what he does. He loves out loud. He has always loved out loud. And I have spent years receiving it in the dark where no one could see.
• • •
I get on the bus.
I sit in the back and I don’t listen to anything and I watch the sky darkening outside the window and I think about all the nights I read his texts and put the phone face down. All the voice memos I listened to in the dark like prayers I couldn’t answer.
I miss you. I'm not okay. Please.
I knew. I always knew. I know you're not okay. That’s the thing I can’t outrun. I knew and I did nothing and I called it love and maybe it was but it was also cowardice and I have to live with the specific hurt of that forever.
Because I am the common denominator to all of Ro's problems. I am the reason he's never been fully okay.
I just want to see him.
I need proof that something good exists in the world.
• • •
Georgetown is bigger than I imagined.
Of course it is. Everything about Ro’s life is bigger than what I come from. That’s the point. That’s always been the point.
I know his schedule. You memorize things about the people you love whether you want to or not. Wednesday afternoons. The bench by the fountain. He mentioned it enough in those first months the good months, when I still answered every call that I can close my eyes and picture it exactly.
• • •
I find the fountain.
And I stop.
Because there he is.
Not at the bench standing near it, head thrown back, laughing. Full body laughing. The kind he doesn’t do for everyone. The kind that’s rare. I know how rare it is. I’ve spent thirteen years trying to earn that laugh and here it is, free and easy and completely unguarded, aimed at someone who isn’t me.
• • •
That's not jealousy. I want to be clear about that. I’m not jealous of the girl next to him. I’m jealous of a version of my life where I could be standing there. Where I could be the reason.
Where we could be normal.
But I can’t be the reason.
That’s what I’m here to confirm.
