Some people like to put tacks on a map of the places they’ve seen, whether through the window of an airport or up close and personal in the heart of a town that doesn’t belong to them. But what I like to do is hunt down the tackiest souvenir shop, browse through the shot glasses and T-shirts, and walk away with a single postcard that will never make its way into a mailbox.
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Promise me that you won’t let someone love you when every night you go to bed feeling like your heart is broken.
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I don’t know if I had ever prayed before. I had said prayers; I said the prayers my mom told me to say at dinner time and before I fell asleep at night. I closed my eyes in church and held hands with the people sitting next to me when the pastor told us to bow our heads—but I almost always peeked.
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It was Jack on our breath and his eyes locked on me while I danced. We were out together with his friends for the first time, but as soon as we arrived the two of us lost ourselves in the crowd of 100 people squeezed into a suburban backyard.
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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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