Epilogue
The water in the Gulf of Thailand is warmer in spring than the water off the coast of Southern California gets even at the peak of summer.
I’m so used to all my nerves being jolted by frigid waters, so used to having to throw my entire body in and wait for the sensation to pass, that the warm waters on this side of the globe feel unnatural to me.
It feels like something as powerful as the ocean should come with a little bite to it.
“We should move here,” says a smooth voice behind me, but I don’t turn away from the ocean, allowing myself to continue basking in the tranquility of it.
“You say that no matter where we are,” I point out.
It’s true. He said it when we backpacked through South America after freshman year—nothing like a three-month language immersion to kick-start my Spanish lessons—and on our spring-break trips to Greece and Spain.
After we spent our junior year studying in Paris, I had to play hardball to actually get him on the plane back home—he’d made quite the case for staying, saying we shouldn’t put Ruthie and Penguin through a second transatlantic flight if we could help it.
I was originally hesitant to travel—I didn’t want the cats to feel abandoned—but at this point, Kimiko is so used to cat-sitting that I feel like she thinks they’re partially hers. She’s watched them every trip except this one and our year in Paris.
Luckily, Sierra is proving to be a great cat-sitter, sending photos and videos twice a day.
“But this time I actually mean it,” he says, wrapping his arms around me. I look up into Alex’s warm brown eyes, overcome by affection for this boy who, year by year, grows closer in appearance to the man I remember.
“You always mean it,” I counter. I really think he does, and I’m always tempted to take him up on it. We’ve been here only a few days, but so far I love Thailand.
Last night, I tried scorpion, the experience calling to mind that first conversation, the only one eighteen-year-old Alex and I had before he came back for his second life. We said lobsters were basically just sea scorpions.
I can now say with absolute certainty that that is not true.
“Say the word, and I’ll invest in real estate right now. Don’t you want a vacation home?”
I roll my eyes, even though his words bring to mind our most recent fight.
Over the past four years, I’ve carefully pinched every penny to be able to afford the vacations we take, working three jobs at one point.
When we were planning this trip—which was both easier and harder than the others because it’s the first one we’ve taken with friends and therefore the first that allowed us to split the cost of rooms so many ways but it also involved taking five additional budgets into consideration—I nearly had a meltdown and called the whole thing off.
Then he offered to cover the cost of the whole trip himself.
It was a mic-drop moment. How could Alex, who had never in his four years of college taken on more than a part-time minimum-wage job, instead working back-to-back unpaid film internships and volunteering on friends’ short films, afford to pay for a seven-person trip to Thailand by himself?
Then he showed me his bank account.
Alex—twenty-one-year-old, not-even-a-business-owner-yet Alex—was already well on his way to becoming a millionaire.
It made me livid.
“You promised you wouldn’t get rich off the backs of others this time,” I screamed.
“I didn’t get rich off the backs of others—I got rich playing the stock market,” he responded calmly, his calmness fanning the flames of my ire.
“That still counts.”
“I’m always going to be me. I can’t just not jump on an opportunity when I see one,” he said, then added, “You act like you aren’t still waiting for Bitcoin to skyrocket.”
The conversation had sent me spiraling. I’d stormed off, too proud to admit that (a) he had a fair point about Bitcoin, and (b) I’d already forgotten how to access said Bitcoin.
Eventually, I realized Alex was right.
Because that’s the thing. He might not be the earnest eighteen-year-old boy I thought he was at the start, but he’s also not the thirty-two-year-old guy I left behind. He’s not even the fifty-eight-year-old man who died alone in his hospital room.
He’s a mix of all three of those men and a new man all in one. He has all the context and wisdom of the man he once was and the life he lived, but some things can’t be changed even by death.
One of those things is that Alex is a man who notices opportunities and jumps on them. Asking him not to invest in what he knew were safe bets felt a little like needless punishment—and considering I plan to spend the rest of my life with him, I might as well be punishing myself too.
I love him the way he is.
I think that once, I might have said that I loved him in spite of his flaws. But I don’t think that’s quite right. Now, I think that every single one of his quirks and flaws only add to the whole picture of Alex that caused me to fall for him.
Maybe that’s what love is—learning to appreciate someone not in spite of their flaws but because of them.
Plus, it’ll be nice to have help as I work my way through grad school.
In two months, I’m getting my bachelor’s degree in psychology, and then I’m going straight into a PhD program.
All that talk about trying new lives, and it turns out that no matter who I try to be, certain things will always ring true.
One, I don’t have an artistic bone in my body.
Two, I’m someone who thrives on academic excellence—only now I’m locked into even more years of schooling.
At least this time, I’m going to try to use my work to make an actual difference—my intention is to become a therapist for other people living their second lives.
I’ve continued going to Second Take Anonymous meetings with Alex and Kimiko, and as the years have gone on, something from my first meeting has really begun to resonate.
Someone—I don’t remember who—made a comment about how over time, the meetings begin to feel sparse, quieter than they should be, like someone is missing, maybe many someones, but you can’t quite place who.
It’s true.
There’s an absence there, and I feel it every time I go.
This second life is a gift—it’s such a fucking gift.
But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t come with its own challenges.
I get how someone wouldn’t be able to handle the secrecy of it all and would just—break.
Let it slip, either intentionally or unintentionally.
I feel like maybe, if people had someone they could talk to candidly, someone who could offer one-on-one support and perspective, fewer of them would slip. At least, I hope that’s the case.
“What are you thinking about?” Alex’s voice cuts through the quiet moment of the two of us standing together, listening to waves breaking.
“I’m just thinking that I’m glad I got this second chance with you,” I admit.
“I’m glad too,” he says. After considering me for a long moment, he presses a kiss to my forehead. “I’ve got a good feeling about this life.”
“You guys are so cute together, it makes me want to vomit,” Kimiko yells from behind us, and then I hear a strange whooshing sound. I turn and look at her lying on a reclining beach chair next to Helen, both of them sunbathing.
“Did you just throw sand at us?” Alex asks Kimiko incredulously.
“Why, did it hit you?” When we both laugh and inform her it didn’t, she says, “Come closer.”
I watch as she picks up another handful of sand and throws it, and sure enough, it doesn’t even come close to hitting us.
“You’re being ridiculous.” Helen snorts, only to find herself with a face full of sand for the comment. Helen quickly joins in Kimiko’s antics, the two flinging sand back and forth.
“Why are you guys lying in the sand? Come in, the water’s great!”
I turn toward Ellie’s voice; he, Madison, and Patrick are waist-deep in the water.
“Yeah, it’s so—so great!” Madison squeals, sputtering as Patrick splashes water at her. She splashes him back, and Ellie joins in.
I watch them interact for several moments and can’t quite keep the frown off my face. Even though she seems happy with Ellie, as the years have gone on, I can’t help but notice there’s still something between her and Patrick.
I’m not the only one who sees it. Alex remarks, “That’s going to get messy.”
“Yeah, it probably will,” I respond after watching them a moment longer. “Do we care?”
“Eh. No. Their lives are their own to figure out.”
I feel a smile tug at my lips as I watch them. He’s right—they’ll figure it out. And they have plenty of time to do it.
“Besides,” he adds, then pauses long enough after the word for me to turn to him expectantly. He reaches out, takes my hand, pulls it up toward his enigmatic smile, and kisses my fingers one by one. “Sometimes messy can be good.”
I think back on the nearly seventeen years I’ve known him. Years as acquaintances, and years as enemies. Years that we spent as strangers, except with too much intimate knowledge between us to ever truly be strangers to each other.
I think about loving him, about how I fell and how not a single moment of that was easy. People got hurt in the process. I got hurt in the process. Our love story was the very definition of messy—we both literally had to die to find our happily ever after.
But now that we’ve found it, I wouldn’t trade it for the world. It might have been messy, but it was worth it.
I don’t believe in fate, but if I did, I’d believe that Alex and I were meant to be. We crossed whole planes of existence and realities to make it happen.
“Sometimes messy can be good,” I repeat, and I really believe it.
I wouldn’t trade our messy love story for anything.