Total pages in book: 154
Estimated words: 148473 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 742(@200wpm)___ 594(@250wpm)___ 495(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 148473 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 742(@200wpm)___ 594(@250wpm)___ 495(@300wpm)
Two perfect words. A simple promise of more. I’ll take what I can get for now. Rather than push my luck, I find a comedy and turn it on.
Sometime into the second episode, she goes quiet. Then, her breathing evens out. She cuddles even closer in her sleep. I pet her hair. It’s perfect. Totally perfect with her here post-sex. With her comfortable with me. With us slipping back into the way we were.
With no regrets.
But even so, I don’t fall asleep. There’s too much happening in my head. Too many questions. Too many thoughts. Quietly, resting her head on the pillow, I slide away, tucking the blanket over her shoulder. I get out of bed in my boxer briefs, pull on a hoodie, and pad downstairs. My laptop’s on the kitchen counter, and I wish it were baseball season. I could fuck around in some baseball forums, talk trash anonymously about the city’s two teams even though I promised Everly I wouldn’t do that again. I need something, anything, to keep me busy because my mind’s a cluttered freeway right now.
I stop at the silver machine, flick it open, and toggle on a browser window. But I don’t have anything to ask Google.
Instead, I close it, head to the hall closet, and open it quietly, taking out a small box from the top shelf. It’s a Lego plant—a prickly pear.
Maeve got it for me for Christmas as part of a whole succulent collection. I go into the living room, flipping on a lamp. I pop open the box and quietly sort the pieces on the coffee table. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle, and I need something to focus on now besides my own tangled thoughts.
But as I’m building the terracotta pot, my attention snags on a frame on the other side of the room.
I set down the plastic arm of the cactus, and head over to the frame to inspect the picture more closely even though I’ve seen it before. It’s the photo of Maeve reading in the tree tent on one of our Big Adventures, curled up on her side in the sleeping bag, a book light illuminating the well-worn pages. I can’t tell what she’s reading, but I bet it’s one of her mother’s books. She loves those, says she reads them till the pages fall out. Pretty sure that’s what she was reading that night.
As it grew darker over the Sierras, I snapped some pictures of the starlit sky from the tree, then turned around and saw her like that in her orange sleeping bag. I remember thinking she’d want to look back on that someday. I took the photo for her so she could remember it.
That was six years ago.
I stare at the photo till my vision goes blurry with memories.
I set it down, but I don’t return to the couch. Something is tugging at me. There’s a pull in my chest. A quiet chorus in the back of my mind that’s growing a little bit louder. Telling me to keep going. Keep asking. Keep looking.
I circle back to the kitchen, pick up the photo of her in the lavender field with the dog in the corner. That was three years ago. She’d wanted to visit Lavender Bliss Farms so fervently that she’d planned it for months. There was one weekend for the peak bloom, she’d said. So we drove to Darling Springs and wandered through the lavender maze, then scoured the fields, the farm’s dog trotting at her side, like he wanted to adopt her. No surprise—Maeve has that way about her. She’d scratched the dog’s head, tossed him some tennis balls, then sniffed every lavender bush, it seemed. She told me scent was most directly linked to memory. “And the more I sniff the lavender, the better I’ll recall this feeling someday. This sweet summer joy I feel right now,” she’d said. “Someday I’ll paint this and call it That Summer Memory.”
I didn’t want her to miss that feeling, so I took a picture.
Or so I told myself.
But now I wonder…
I turn and take a tour of all the photos of her I’ve framed. The graduation shot, taken more than seven years ago. The ice hotel from five years ago. One from four years ago after she rode a double-loop upside-down roller coaster, and her cheeks were flushed and her hair a mess when she stepped off it. “My heart has never beat so fast,” she’d said.
So I took a picture.
Telling myself it was for her.
It was for her to remember.
It was for her someday.
I walk over to the small mirror by the front door. The one I hung up last night. Her art. Her almost kiss. Her friends’ advice—keep snacks handy.
And in the reflection, I’m looking at the truth of my actions. I didn’t hang her art for the camera crew.