I used to only be able to remember a fountain. I’m not even sure if it was a fabricated memory, or something genuine. It’s just what I remembered. It was growing green with algae on one side, where the light from the setting sun would strike it just right to mingle with the water spilling over to birth life. I used to only be able to remember the fountain.
That is, until someone said her name.
From her name tumbles hundreds of tiny, atomic memories. They are stories told in a single second, blurred images lost at the borders, vignetted vignettes. I remember other things — dark halls, bay windows and billowing curtains, a guest house, or maybe it was a garage.
the car in the garage starts.
Someone said her name, just in passing, and everything from those days came back.
Dorothy.
We played together, running through those dark halls until we burst out into the sunlight, one’s hand finding the other’s. Then we’d play under the trees, in the grass, with the fireflies, until her mother called for us to come get dinner.
I think I loved her even then, I just didn’t have the right words for it. I only knew that I told myself I would do anything for her, and I would have — anything, at least, that a five-year-old is capable of doing. I knew that I would do the most ridiculous things just to see her smile, to hear her laugh.
Time, as it seems to relish in doing, dragged us away from one another. Perhaps, really, it only dragged me, struggling against its suffocating snare, and instead took her by the hand and gently guided her, like Virgil with Dante.
I was pulled from her by time’s indiscriminations, jerked this way and that in the tumultuous currents of its haphazard whims.
There was always another girl, dancing through my mind just enough to distract me from her momentarily. But she was always there in the background, a nameless face in the crowd.
It took years for anyone to love me back. It took longer for her.
And we didn’t see each other for years. For over a decade, my life continued on as though I had never known her, as though I had never sworn to myself, lying awake at night, that there wasn’t a single thing I wouldn’t do for her.
One summer afternoon, our house phone rang, and I think part of me knew that the moment it did, something was going to change forever. It’s all cliché.
To use another cliché — part of me knew this sudden phone call would be the beginning of the end.
the garage door is closed.
“Hello?”
A single shaky exhalation, as though all the anticipation that had been mounting, and mounting, and mounting finally released. And then:
“Hey.”
We hadn’t spoken in years, yet somehow, somehow, we knew the other’s voice instantly.
We agreed to revisit what we’d left behind — that friendship, those trees, the fireflies. The minute we hung up, I got into my decrepit station wagon and soon found myself winding up her serpentine driveway, like I had so many times years ago. When I parked, I only found one car I didn’t recognize waiting for me. Hers. Then the door to the house opened — that great, white, turreted manor with twice as much ivy creeping up its sides than it had when I last saw it.
There she was, however; there she was.
She was standing in the doorway. It was simultaneously as though we were strangers who had never met, and longtime friends who had last seen each other, perhaps, only a couple of days prior. It was hard to make the distinction; we greeted one another so cavalierly, then she led me through the capillary halls of the manor, through its heart, and into the backyard.
We walked in silence, as she guided me through the trees. The sun had begun to set, the motley sky occasionally cleaving through the forest’s verdant leaves, a marriage of pinks and reds and oranges.
And as the sun set, I noticed the random of the fireflies, emerging from their sunlit slumber to greet the looming nighttime in a celebration of lights.
The coupling of senses and memory, I think, struck us both, then. The fireflies and the distinct, lingering scent of a humid summer’s evening wrenched us, reeling and spiraling, back to suns long set.
And then, we picked up where we left off.
We stumbled through the woods surrounding the house, over roots and through brambles under the darkening sky. Our hands found one another’s like they themselves longed to do it, our fingers entwined like they were built for it.
We were made of the same material; we were made with the other in mind.
We slowed under one of the tallest oaks in the forest. The night had fully fallen, as it does so abruptly in the summer. Drunken on memory, we stopped our wanderings entirely and I kissed her there, in the darkness fragmented by starlight and fireflies.
Then she took me by the hand again, and led me, blindly but with sure-footing, two decades worth of knowledge of these woods, back to the house, back through those halls, and into her bedroom, where we never came divided until the sun showed itself again.
i need to stop writing about girls i’m hopelessly in love with.
i need to stop everything.
so the car is running in the garage.
It felt like we spent the whole summer like that, coming back to the house from whatever we had wasted the day doing, only to trip through those halls, climb up the stairs to her room, and wake the next morning buried in sheets, naked, twisted together.
We almost always had the house to ourselves; she was the only child, and her parents worked often and traveled frequently.
One morning, that first summer, when the sun had just bested the horizon, I woke to the sounds of her parents returning to the house a day early from a weekend trip to their upstate summer home.
It took me a moment to realize what was happening. I untangled myself from her and rubbed my dreams from my eyes. The rose of the morning sun had just begun to bloom in her room, swallowing everything, drowning the room in its delicate pinks. It drowned the two of us, too, the only beating hearts in its warm, somehow lonely, expanse.
I heard her parents’ voices from downstairs, winding up the staircase and slipping under the bedroom door, sly and frightening as a phantom in the night. I must have practically leapt out of bed, rousing her from her sleep in my fervor to find my clothing, strewn around the room, discarded in the previous evening’s frenzied passion.
She rolled over, stretching with a tiny moan, as I pulled my wrinkled shirt over my head. Her fingers lazily gripped the fabric, a weary attempt to pull me back into the bed, into the blankets, into her.
“Don’t go,” she murmured, her voice deadened against her pillow.
I smiled, kneeling beside the bed and reaching over to stroke her hair, tucking it back behind her ear. “You really want your parents to find me up here?”
She whined a little, taking my hand and kissing a knuckle. “I’m gonna tell them soon anyway.”
“But not yet.”
“Not yet.”
“Okay.” I bent over to kiss her forehead. “Then I should go.”
She turned away, huffing in feigned anger. “I hate you.”
“You don’t,” I said, crossing the room to open her window.
“I don’t,” she agreed while I swung my legs over the windowsill into the cool morning air. The sun seemed to burn a little brighter than it had when I had woken, just minutes ago. “I really don’t,” she said as I slipped out, caught hold of the trellis, and closed her window shut behind me.
These are the moments I replay in my head, reaching for the warmth I’d felt then, the joy, the way she had wearily tugged on my shirt. I replay them endlessly, nightly as I try to fall asleep, wondering what had gone wrong, what I could have done differently.
Another moment, just like a movie. It was nighttime, at the tail-end of that first summer. The only light came in fleeting bursts as we passed under the streetlights, like a camera with the flash on, encapsulating brief glimpses of the larger whole.
She drove me to an overlook, with a view of the city that dwarved the already tiny town in which we grew up. It was one of those views that made you feel simultaneously insignificant and incomprehensibly boundless.
She parked and we got out of the car, barely pausing to look at the earth stretching out before us as we climbed onto the hood, laughing as it caved beneath our combined weight. “Straight kids in movies make it look so easy, huh?”
When we found our balance, we settled in, finally allowing ourselves to take in the view. The city lights’ pollution bleached the sky a charred orange, suffocating the stars, but we didn’t mind much; the lights became their own smattering of grounded stars, a sliver of the universe come down to Earth.
“I think I love you, you know?”
I laughed. “You think?”
She gave my shoulder a gentle smack. “You know what I mean.”
I paused, tearing my eyes from the skyscrapers, the concrete towers that reached for the very heavens their brutish angles tore into and their lights poisoned, to look at her. She had been looking at me when she said it, but had turned back to face the view instead of me immediately after; a habit of hers when she thought she’d gone too far, or let me see too much of her.
“I think I love you too,” I murmured to her, and to the hidden stars.
I’ve given her another three years of my life since then. Three years spent waiting.
And at first, we were light like that. We were simple. We were everything, and nothing. We were an incomprehensible black hole, vacant and swirling, consuming whatever drifted too close, never to be seen again, and we were microscopic, a singular particle in the ever-expanding universe.
We laughed, we kissed, we fucked.
Slowly, over the next couple of years, our days became consumed with less laughing, more fucking, and fighting. Laughing about anything and nothing. Fighting about everything. Fucking as a result of either.
Though I looked, I couldn’t find the reasons for the fighting. I think she was growing tired of me, even then.
The thought was like the prick of a thorn — a minor wound, at first, until it became so deeply embedded in me that it was all I could focus on, all I knew. It became infected as it aged, moist with lymph and oozing pus. Sex became my way of calling her back to me, but it only reopened the wound, scarring it, new flesh replacing the old until it could no longer feel.
I grew distant as things worsened, allowing my thoughts to thunder around in my head but never letting them slip from my lips. It was easiest, to stifle and ignore, until she tore the scar open again.
We were in her car. I remember the glare of the sunset as we drove towards its flames, and I remember the dead bugs splattered on her windshield. We were driving home from the local train station, after an afternoon spent laughing in the streets of the city, but fighting in its subway tunnels and train cars.
There was a silent stiffness in the air between us that night, the kind of awkwardness where you become hyperaware of being perceived, driving you into a forced stillness, a victim of Medusa.
“We’re moving away,” Dorothy said, almost more to the steering wheel than to me. Only when I hadn’t responded, letting the news sit between us, as heavy as a third passenger, did she risk taking a glance over at me. “Across the country. To California.”
I still didn’t respond. I was trying to parse out what she meant, what it meant for us, without asking.
“Can you please say something?”
“Like what?”
“Anything.”
I paused again, cycling through the vortex of questions swirling through my mind.
“Okay,” I said.
“Is that it?” She glanced over at me again. “Is that all you have to say?”
“Well, I’m sorry I don’t have a whole fucking diatribe prepared for this, ‘cause this is big fucking news to me. How long have you known?”
She sighed, the color draining from her knuckles as she choked the steering wheel in her steely grip. “Like, a month.”
“A month? Why didn’t I hear about this sooner?”
“Because I knew you’d act like this. I knew you’d get pissed off; you always do when I do something that doesn’t involve you.”
“Always? What –“ I cut myself off, partially because I knew it wasn’t the current issue and partially because I knew she was right. “So you just put off telling me? And I kinda think my girlfriend moving 3,000 miles away involves me.”
Silence.
The silence meant she knew I was right, at least about this, but she’d never admit it.
“What are you saying, then? What does this mean for us?”
“I was hoping you’d have an answer for that,” she said.
“Well, I don’t.”
“I don’t,” she paused, cutting herself off. “I don’t want to leave you,” she began again. “But at the same time, we’re so young, and I don’t wanna be tied down to someone so far away, and,” she trailed off. “Yeah.”
I stared out the windshield, looking but not quite seeing, until another insect crashed into it, dying on impact. Dorothy hit the wipers and the makeshift graveyard was pushed off the glass and into our wake as we cut through the thick, humid summer air.
“Have you even told your parents about us?” The question forced its way out of me, a prisoner of the last two years getting its first taste of freedom.
“Emily–“ We had just pulled up to my house; she parked the car, leaning into the steering wheel as she dropped her head into her hands.
“Have you?”
“No.”
I unbuckled my seatbelt and got out of the car. “Then go,” I said, slamming the door closed and going into my house without another word. I heard her get out of the car, shouting my name, begging me to come back and talk, but I locked the front door behind me.
I don’t think she drove off for another 10 minutes.
Her car pulled away, her tail-lights suffocating in the sunset, planting a seed in the depths of my gut, which grew and grew like ivy, winding its way through my intestines, up my throat, and out my mouth, choking me with my own resentment. Love and resentment always come married, for me.
I let it sit within me, festering, growing, even as I swallowed it, momentarily softening it, when I went back to that mansion, the last time.
no, this is the last time.
Plagued by what ifs, how comes, the why nots, I oscillated between a solar system of conflicting emotions, a satellite separated from its orbit, at the steering column.
And if the universe collapsed, unwound, and rebuilt itself, would it look the same?
Would it look the same?
It didn’t look the same. The house didn’t look the same.
The ivy that clung to the façade had started to die. It was the beginning of Autumn. Her car again stood, alone, in the driveway.
I knocked on the door first, then rang the doorbell, to no answer. I walked around the side of the house, past the garage, to the back of the house,
There she was.
I found her standing by the forest, right where the manicured lawn became the untamed wilds. Rocking back and forth on her feet, as though afraid to cross the threshold.
I noticed the faint, occasional spark of a firefly, mingling together in the final, moonlit drift of the season. I think about it often, the patterns and signals of the fireflies, random to the lesser informed, random to us.
“I don’t want you to go,” I heard myself say.
“Is that what you came here to say?” She spoke to the trees.
“I don’t really know why I came. I sort of blacked out and then I was here.”
She turned to face me. “I’m moving; I can’t control that. And even if I could, I’m not sure I would.”
“So it’s over? We’re just done? There’s phones and planes, I mean, I could, I don’t know, go to school in California, or something, whatever.”
Desperation.
“I haven’t felt anything for you in months.”
As suspected.
“Last time you said you didn’t want to break up. That was a lie?”
“No. I didn’t want to.”
“And now you do?”
She sighed. “What do you want me to say?”
“Anything,” I said, echoing her from those weeks before.
A pause.
“You were an asshole last time. You were acting like a child. You were selfish. I realized it wasn’t worth trying to salvage anything.”
“I’m sorry. I acted crazy,” but you kept a secret from me for a month.
Another pause.
“Is that it?” I asked.
“I don’t have a speech for you. What do you want? Some long-winded explanation of every single little thing that went wrong? Everything that I feel? You’re not always gonna get that. I just want to be done.”
Done.
“I think you should go,” were her last words to me.
So I went.
Without another word, I left.
I still can’t shake the sense that we were meant to be together, because of our story. Because of the improbability of events that led us to finding one another again. Because it looked like the dance in the trees, the dance of the fireflies, the random of the fireflies.
You had built your home in my mind, a vast manor like the one you grew up in, and then you lit it aflame, watching until it was a pile of ashes. I thought I had burned it all down, but now I realize it was you.
I didn’t return to that manor again, not until now. This time with intention. I wish I could keep caring for myself the way I used to care for you.
but it’s starting to get dark.
it’s the exhaust.
how can i feel so sorry for myself, knowing a grandparent will die, a friend will fall sick, a parent will lose their child?
a parent will lose their child.
the exhaust.
nothing feels real
when did we change when did we get so old why did you do all those things to me what did i do what did i do
i loved you and i hated you
no you didnt but i did. i did
the fumes are creeping in down my lungs into my blood its all getting dark its so dark
i cant think straight. i can only think of the water and the trees and the fireflies and her. her
by the fountain at her big house and the sun had just fallen beneath the treetops the fountain greening for the wetness spilling over and roaming down its sides. You didn’t really laugh I didn’t really laugh But our warm wet warm fingers tangled together children never really laugh as much as you’d expect them to everything is so serious
mud for rain summer rain. for twelve minutes we played pretending to be dogs. then we’d laugh but still not that much we always took playing seriously. your mother opened the door and shouted that dinner would be ready soon and we all ate together and i felt like part of the family but never again. i loved you then and i love you now
in the depths of the worst i thought i was the villain i thought i was wrong or i was broken well maybe I was broken you broke me. You broke me and it wasnt my fault i didn’t do anything
oh god what have i done it’s too late you’re in california You’re gone. so am i and so are the fireflies