Choose Life

“I wish there was a way to know that the last time is the last time while it’s still happening. The last time you step in the door of your childhood home, the last time you kiss a lover, the last time you ever see someone you love. Because if I had known, I would have made sure it wasn’t the last time. Or at least I would have lived in that moment a little longer.”

“Thinking of someone the way he was is really just another way of writing. Thinking about someone I was once in love with—how he’d peel an orange and hand me a slice or how his white T-shirt would peek out from under his gray sweatshirt. The way it would curve around his neck somehow made me disposed to him. Thinking about that crescent of white cotton is a version of writing. Thinking about how, once, to make me less nervous before an interview I was preparing for, he pulled his pants down in public. Remembering his smile as my nerves relaxed, and as he pulled his pants up and looked around, is how I write and what I write about, even if it’s nothing I’ve ever written about.”

“24 How thrilling to appear in his eyes. She can’t understand what he’s saying: she’s too busy chewing his voice. She looks at the mouth she’ll never kiss, at the shoulder she’ll never cry on, at the hand she’ll never hold, and at the ground where their shadows meet.”

“28 July. —I am more and more unable to think, to observe, to determine the truth of things, to remember, to speak, to share an experience; I am turning to stone, this is the truth.”

“We live in a small, musty dorm room but it’s perfect because it is the first place we’ve ever lived alone. We put plastic bottles of vodka in our tiny refrigerator and laugh. We watch reruns of our favorite childhood shows and sleep until noon. The boy I love never visits. The boy you love visits until you break his heart. We live in a four-bedroom apartment just the two of us. And even with all that space, we’re usually in the same room. We throw parties more often than we should. There is a designated place that I go when I’m drunk to cry. You always know where to find me. The boy I love comes over and ignores me. The boy I love comes over and kisses me. The boy you love comes over and you break his heart again. The boys stop coming. It’s just us. I live in my parents’ house but my parents are gone. It’s strange, this open space, this haunting. A boy loves me but I don’t love him back. He stays on Skype while I fall asleep. I don’t know how long he waits to hang up but when I wake up, everything is new again. I stop answering his calls when I fall in love with someone else. Soon, I know him and his apartment as well as my own. Soon, I don’t know what I did before him. I show him my childhood bedroom and smile. We live in a house a mile away from campus. The boy I love helps us move in. He’ll be gone before we move out but we don’t know that yet. I would have screamed if someone had told me. We lose things slowly that year, incrementally, one piece at a time. We don’t notice until everything is gone. This house, this time, is the last of the golden time. We would have screamed if someone had told us what was coming. We live in a two-bedroom apartment with no natural light. It’s our last year of living together so we make a small effort to decorate, but end up leaning a picture against a wall for six months before mounting it. Things are getting bad and my mother is calling you to make sure I’m breathing in my room. Things are getting bad and we’re hiding in our apartment sealed against it all, watching bad TV shows and eating Chinese food. In this apartment, we feel lucky. We feel protected. It is the last of these moments. At the end of our lease, I fall in love again. This one sticks. I am back at my parents’ house and you are in an apartment across town. The first time I visit, it seems so strange that you have to give me directions to where you live after so many years of living down the hall from you. This year, it’s your turn for things to get bad. This year, it’s my turn to comfort you. I try my best. It’s not enough. I try harder. I am still at my parents’ house and you are still in the apartment across town. Now, we are both mourning and both comforting. You are watching someone you love die and I’m trying to come to terms with the fact that my own body is trying to kill itself. Neither of these things are easy. We look back at the early years and laugh at what we thought we knew of grief then. We do our best. It’s not enough. We do worse. We drive two hours away to look at a new house in a new city. We sleep in the same bed in a mid-priced hotel room and eat breakfast burritos. We drive to the new house and meet my new roommate. I have never lived with anyone other than you but we like her, so I sign the lease. You go back to your apartment. I live in the new house in the new city and the worst thing happens. When the worst thing happens, you tell me in a text message and I call your mother then pack my car. I drive two hours to your apartment and sit with you. We watch TV. We eat burgers. We do the things that need to be done when the worst thing happens. At the end of the weekend, I drive back and leave you in the apartment. Even as I turn out of the driveway, I’m wishing I didn’t have to. I want to tell my professors that the worst thing has happened and I can’t be expected to leave you but that’s not the way the world works so I drive towards the highway and blink into the sun. You move a few states away. You live in a house I’ve never seen in a city I’ve never been to. I move across the country to an apartment you’ve never seen in a city you’ve been to twice. We couldn’t find each other on a map. It’s absurd, this distance. We don’t know how to be this far away from each other. But we learn. But we find a new way to bring the golden days back.”