It was probably close to 11 p.m. when the song came on. I had broken up with my boyfriend only a few days earlier, spent an hour crying, took a fifteen-minute break, started crying again.
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My mom and I are similar in almost every way. The amount of parmesan cheese on our spaghetti, the sweaters we stop to point at in store windows, the scenes in movies we fast forward through and the scenes in movies we watch again and again and again. My dad complains that she always has a teammate when we gang up on him, my sister gets drowned out by our constant chatter.
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I wasn’t prepared for the high-speed film reel of memories to hit me the second we drove off the 405 onto the 101 highway.
Two hours of driving through my tears on the day I said goodbye to a boy my brain had grown accustomed to telling “I love you,” when my heart just wasn’t there yet. An entire CD of Lady Antebellum Christmas songs my sister and I played on repeat on our way home for winter break. A 40-mile trek with three girls who shared my apartment and the label “best friend” just to walk into a Target.
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I hadn’t swam in the ocean for years until he asked me if I wanted to go in.
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I didn’t realize it until I came face-to-face with a woman with fear so large in her eyes that I can’t remember another feature about her. I saw those eyes when I was hand in hand with a boy leading me through the crowd. I was probably smiling—I usually am with him, especially because he agreed to come with me.
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“Your amazing,” he writes just as my treadmill starts to speed up.
And yes, he spelled it wrong, and the editor in me tries to withhold her judgment and not let an apostrophe, re, keep the butterflies at bay. But the butterflies aren’t coming anyway. They rarely come with him.
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Seven days ago I got a phone call that sparked a change in my life. That was nine months since graduation. Nine months since the clock struck midnight and life gave me another year to look ahead to. Nine months since all I could see in front of me was a massive pit of fog and millions of question marks.
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Since the day I stepped out of a classroom for the last time, shoved old notebooks into a plastic Target bag and donated my no. 2 pencils to a roommate who still had a year of tests to take, I have been asked the same question.
Read MoreWhat do you want now?”
She’s shivering on the bed.
He’s lying on the floor, face up, hands crossed on his chest. Praying she’ll say something. Imagining she won’t.
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