The Seven Year Slip

Because the things that mattered most never really left.

The love stays.

The love always stays, and so do we

La tristesse durera toujours.”

The sadness will last forever.

It wasn’t a lie. There was sadness, and there was despair, and there was pain—but there was also laughter, and joy, and relief. There was never grief without love or love without grief, and I chose to think that my aunt lived because of them

“If you do it right,” I repeated, “once is all you need.”

I didn’t find out who I wanted to be until I was almost forty. You have to try on a lot of shoes until you find some you like walking in. Never apologize for that. Once I found mine, I’ve been content for twenty years.”

It would keep breaking our hearts, everyone who knew her, over and over and over again. It was the kind of pain that didn’t exist to someday be healed by pretty words and good memories. It was the kind of pain that existed because, once upon a time, so did she. And I carried that pain, and that love, and that terrible, terrible day, with me. I got comfortable with it. I walked with it.

Sometimes the people you loved left you halfway through a story.

Sometimes they left you without a goodbye.

And, sometimes, they stayed around in little ways. In the memory of a musical. In the smell of their perfume. In the sound of the rain, and the itch for adventure, and the yearning for that liminal space between one airport terminal and the next.

I hated her for leaving, and I loved her for staying as long as she could.

And I would never wish this pain on anyone.

Life doesn’t always go as planned. The trick is to make the most of it when it doesn’t,”

Everything would run its course—come into my life and then leave again, because nothing stayed. Nothing ever stayed.

But things could return

“You could never be a bad idea, Lemon.”

. “Be merciless about your dreams, Iwan.”

“Your life changed because of some French fries?”

He barked a laugh, bright and golden, and said to my utter surprise, “The things you least expect usually do.”