I had always been drawn to the bedtime stories my parents told me, and to shows like Wishbone and the Reading Rainbow on PBS, but the first time I felt that clawing urge to master the skill for my own, I was in kindergarten. Another little girl, named Jessica, had already made friends with the lines, curves and edges of the alphabet. She could read all on her own and was learning how to write the letters herself. I felt envy so green that I grew chloroplast and started photosynthesizing my own energy from the sun of that wanting. I wanted to be better at reading than Jessica was! I wanted to be able to immerse myself so deeply that nothing else in the Milky Way existed but those pages.
I demanded my father teach me, and he finally relented in setting our first reading lesson at the library after school. It was like making an instant best friend, where you know the bond is strong and you know the bond is for life. We met, exchanging tentative glances with one another. She excitedly told me all she knew about moons. I was mesmerized by the way her mouth shapeshifted as she spoke simple words: the tunnel of a long “u” sound, the slight grimace of a long “e,” the soft pursing of a short “o.”
We became fast friends, doing everything together and holding hands everywhere we went: on the playground during recess, in the cafeteria during lunch, secretly during class, under the desk and away from teacher’s prying eyes. If Mrs. Peterson found out, we’d be separated for sure, because we clearly weren’t focused on anything but each other. We’d make eye contact and grin, the need to keep the laughter inside of our bodies burning our cheeks. Knowing how close we were to being caught only heightened the hilarity exponentially. But even if caught, even when caught, we’d hold hands in detention, still.
In second grade, she had a growth spurt, of body and of mind, and there was more and more of her to love. She introduced me to legends from bygone times, creatures from far off lands accessed through wardrobes, to new words and ideas that shook me to the core to comprehend. My eyes dilated as I took deeper and deeper gulps of her, like an asthmatic desperate for oxygen who realized their inhaler just ran out mid-attack.
Through middle school and high school, we were so inseparable that I absorbed her essence by osmosis. We snuck around in the library. We sat together at the back of the bus. We hung out at the park until the streetlights opened their sleepy eyes at dusk. We got popcorn fried chicken at spicy level three with avocado boba shakes before going home. She was the first one I sought solace and comfort from when my mom sat my brother and me down in a McDonald’s booth to tell us she and my father were splitting up. She was sliding around in the backseat, giddy as I was with excitement when my dad took me for my first driving lesson.
I started taking all that she had taught me and making it my own, penning tall tales and creating worlds of wonder that I could escape to with her at my side. There were some nights we swapped stories, talking through the night until we fell asleep sitting upright at our desks. There were other nights she shared my bed, the sheets a makeshift tent we camped in with flashlights to keep the lurking monsters at bay. We laid face to face, so close that when she closed her eyes, my lashes brushed her cheek; so close that when she sighed before succumbing to sleep, it was my lungs that deflated.
We eventually went to the same university, took the same classes, lounged together on breaks in the shaded grass under trees so big they blocked the Las Vegas Strip from view. They brought us into an alternate reality, so close and yet so far from the neon skyline. Our imagined futures were woven together on a loom of our own creation, and in all the vast potential of what could come to pass, whether we be nomadic freelancers tending sheep in the south of France by day and drinking wine and writing articles by night, whether we owned a combination bookstore cafe that smelled of old paper and buttered croissants, or taught new generations of high schoolers a love of the English language as passionate as our own, I never envisioned a timeline in which our fingers did not interlace.
Graduation day came and it seemed as though the minute our caps hit the floor like confetti for giants, adulthood and all the responsibilities therein came, not just rapping gently on my chamber door like a naughty raven, but knocking like the goddamn police with a battering ram. Everything that had once been a definitive statement devolved into a question: What next? Where will we live? How will we afford anything? Did we rush into things? Maybe I should have been a doctor or a nurse like everybody in my family had wished for. The doubt in me projected a beam like the top of the Luxor Casino and I began to see our path as some fantastical acid trip whose rainbow high I was finally crashing down from.
It was like a switch had been flipped within me and I questioned if it was true love, if it had ever been love at all. As I fell deeper and deeper into despair, the ease and comfort that had been the foundation of our entire relationship fled the country with 3 fake IDs and its assets liquidated into offshore Swiss bank accounts. I didn’t know how to connect with her anymore. My fingers were clumsy as they tried to intertwine with hers, an act that had once been as natural as blinking or doing a happy food dance or laughing at farts. What was worse still was I didn’t know how to fix it, or even how to tell her.
And so, I ran. And I hate running. It’s my least favorite and honestly the worst ever form of cardio that exists. But I ran away from her as though every mile I put between us in distance would fill the cavernous void left in my chest cavity. Funnily enough, when I ghosted her, it was I who remained haunted by the cutting grayness of her absence that permeated my world like the mists of Avalon.
I began to work full time in a job I took as a stepping stone, away from her and the itinerary of our plans. I made new friends, took on new hobbies, and yet, everywhere I looked and everywhere I went, I saw specters of her that could not be exorcised by neither the holiest of waters nor drowned by the most cursed of spirits. (Who thought black licorice would make a good beverage?) I would see stories she told me turned into movies, I’d be surprised by her lexicon rising from my own lips, unbidden, I’d see others locked hands and rapturous with their own passions. If only I could snort a line of selective amnesia, then I could be a blue haired wonder under eternal sunshine, my mind spotless and free.
I resigned myself to a half-life. The unstable atom that was me decayed radioactively with each day, each hour, each minute spent away from her. I moved on, as much as I could. Yet when I closed my eyes at night, memories etched forever into the chalice of my soul reared their beautiful heads and roared.
Years later, my life indeed looked vibrant and full to outsiders: I had a great job. I kept busy- cooking, traveling, and painting. I even got married and had the house with a big yard for my 2 furry kids. I could turn on a smile so big you could see it from behind me. I had almost forgotten what it felt like to bathe in the warmth of her embrace, to run my fingers through the silk of her hair. Almost.
While speaking with my old high school teacher, he invited me to join a writing group led by his favorite college professor, inspired to bring people together during quarantine. I hissed a sharp inhale through my teeth as my finger was sliced with a papercut of her memory. I decided I would attend. Then I chickened out. Then the day was upon me.
I joined the Zoom meeting with shaking hands and a heart fluttering so quickly I thought it stopped beating. Face to face with my first love once again, I had nowhere left to run, nor did I want to. I felt her strong fingers thread once again with my sweaty ones as we tapped on the keyboard together. I felt no malice or scorn, no passive aggressiveness or anger, only her love shining brightly upon me as I rekindled my romance with the written word. Maybe the future wouldn’t be exactly as envisioned, but I knew that I’d never run from her again.