Love Story #4
“I used to think,” I started, and stopped.
“I used to think that if I had not already seen snow, it meant I would never get to. That’s how I thought about things back then.
That the ending was already written.” My voice was quiet.
“And then I thought, eventually, maybe I was wrong about that. Maybe I could rewrite it.” I looked at Zane.
“I thought he’d rewritten it too. I wanted to believe that was the ending.
That he found his way out of whatever brought him there. ”
“He tried,” Zane said. “I think he tried for as long as he could.”
“I know,” I said. “I know he did.”
And the thing about knowing someone tried, about believing they held on for as long as they could, is that it does not make the ground any less cold under your hands.
It does not move the stone. It does not change the dates.
It just sits beside you the same way he once did, close enough to feel and too far to reach, asking nothing, answering nothing, just present in the dark with you until you are ready to get up.
“I didn’t fall in love with you because Henry pointed at you,” Zane told me, but I had not asked, so it meant he was answering the question for himself.
“I fell in love with you because you were someone that I couldn’t stop looking at from the first moment I saw you, and then I found out you were also the person my best friend had told me to watch for, and both of those things are true at once, and they don’t cancel each other out.”
Something large and incredibly quiet was settling through me, the way water fills a hole in the ground from the bottom, not the top.
“I chose you first,” Zane said. “Seventeen years old, a school I did not want to be at, and I chose you before I knew what I was choosing. Henry told me not to let you fall after I was already standing as close as I knew how to get. He didn’t aim me at you.
” He exhaled, slowly. “I was already looking, I had already seen you. He just told me not to look away.”
Zane landed somewhere right then. I could see it in his face, the settling of a mind that had been running from a question and finally caught up to an answer. His face cleared. Not completely, but enough. His question had an answer. He was okay.
I walked over to the door to the porch, and I let him have it. I stepped outside into the air I hoped would help me process everything. And I turned my own question over in the quiet place he could not see.
Henry had seen me when he was dying. He had found me in a graveyard when he had already made his decision, and he had sat beside me for three nights and looked at me with something genuine, and then he had left, and what he had seen had been real and I had felt it and it had been the one untouched memory I owned.
Zane followed me, he didn’t say anything yet, but his warmth filled the space beside me. We both stood there, just breathing. Trying to lay everything out in our minds and organize it in a way that felt more comfortable.
Tom had seen me, too late, after the bad things and not before. But he had waited until he was counting down, until there were a vault and a sticky note and no time left to hand it to me any other way.
And Zane. Zane who was looking at me right now with his grief settling and his answer found. He denied it, but Zane had been pointed at me by a dead boy’s last instruction. Zane had found me when he was breaking. Zane had chosen me in the context of a loss that had made everything urgent.
Zane loved me the way my dad filled the hummingbird feeder.
The last promise to the dead. But here is the thing; my dad did not fill the feeder because he cared about the hummingbirds.
He did not feed them out of love, but obligation.
I thought I had cleared that feeling out of my manipulative mind.
I thought Zane chose to orbit me. I understood I was not the moon, and I still do not think I am.
Maybe Henry is Zane’s moon, and his acts are tides moving with gravity.
Henry had been haunting me without me knowing.
And maybe he wasn’t just picking up my things at three in the morning because he was bored and needed something to look at.
Maybe he was rearranging my things to help me find them, placing them around where I could see them.
Trying to help. But it was still a haunting, regardless of the ghosts’ intentions.
And now, I was still in my dead father’s house asking something I did not have the language for yet, something in the shape of: Does anyone choose me before something unbearable makes them need to?
I did not say it. Zane had just fought his way to the other side of something, and I was not going to hand him hill to climb over, too.
Instead, I said, “I understand.”
I sat down on the bench that I knew so damn well. And I meant it about all of it, the choosing, the direction, the dream, the cemetery, all of it.
Zane sat beside me and I leaned toward him and put my head against his shoulder, and he put his arm around me, and we sat there on the porch of my dead parents’ house with his dead best friend’s letter taking over the entire area, and I held the question somewhere inside where it could rest until I knew how to ask it properly.
In front of us, the hummingbird feeder hung, no longer empty in the dark. The thing I had filled was the thing I had not yet learned to keep.