3 seasons of a story

Winter

It was the winter of dying things. Tall trees stripped bare, trunks splintered from a month of unseasonable cold that left the Texas ground coated in thick and unpredictable ice. We huddled together in his bedroom, for warmth and to escape from the mundanity of the endless gray days of resolution and new birth that January brought.He was a purposeful man; the type of person who made pour-over coffee with filtered water and organic free-trade coffee beans, roasted locally for flavor. I was anxious and desperate to drown in my love for someone else. The type of person whose identity was in constant flux, shaped mostly by the eccentricities of the last person they talked to.

Our love was ending. In February he would move up to the Northwest to start his master’s degree and I would stay here in a dead-end job at a used bookstore, fishing old receipts and grimy bookmarks from the middle of books returned to us for pennies on the dollar.

I couldn’t go with him. We had talked about it three times before and each time brought the same result. Once, right after college when our love was new and dangerous, he suggested moving to San Francisco. I could eke out a living on low-paying writing gigs until I made my big break as a short story writer. He could pay our way, with an inflated salary doing something complex but safe and stable.

The second was a fever dream request made as we were on vacation in Portland. I got a nasty bout of the flu, leaving me confined to the cramped and low-lit hotel room leaving yellow stains of sweat streaked across the white sheets. Deliriously, I told him about my theory on love: how we meet the people we’re meant to love in stages and how, despite so much insisting to the contrary, it was possible to both love two people at once and nobody at all. How marriage was a sham because it focused too much on longevity and assumed people could never fall out of love with someone they cared for deeply. To get divorced, was the biggest sign of a failed relationship, not an eventuality in the long course of budding and wilting relationships.

Buzzed on canned wine and lightly nauseous from the sickness now brewing inside of him, he told me what he hated most about love: the insidious closeness of it. To him, it felt wrong to assume that two people couldn’t love each other and live separately. No, instead we expected that after an arbitrary date, a couple would naturally start living together, melding each other into every facet of the others’ life, leaving little room for mystery or secrets. As he described it, the fire of love needed oxygen and space to expand, otherwise it was snuffed out too soon. I don’t think I agreed, but I nodded in approval nevertheless.

The third time I asked him directly. “Yes, someday,” he said.Shortly after he started applying to colleges.

Spring

It was the spring of simple sins. I met a man online who liked TTRPGs and sang show tunes in the shower. We had a couple of dates: coffee shops and cocktail bars where people, richer than us, sipped drinks with festive names. He invited me to his place south of the city and we spent three months living together in domestic bliss.

I lost track of time. In the mornings he’d make breakfast. In the evenings I cooked dinner. We bought a condo together, raised a dog, attended family functions, and grew so old that our skin became paper thin, our jowls sagged, and our foreheads creased with lines from laughter and too little sunscreen. When he died I buried him myself underneath a towering magnolia tree, white flowers blooming endlessly. I continued on—a miserable and achy life. Ageless, I watched as the world burned out, the winters turning into perpetual summer, the ice caps melting and drowning whole nations in their wake. I boarded a ship and we blasted off into space. In each of the stars, I watched his figure gleam and sparkle, his shape and form wrapped tight around the planets orbiting far off in the black sheet of space. We veered off course, pulled in by a black hole. Our bodies distorted, twisted, and splayed in two before stretching and spiraling back in on themselves. Every atom of me was pulled apart escaping into the pristine white void. There, his body appeared, gleaming brightly against the eternal white. He whispered something to me that I could not decipher and kissed me gently and then it was the end of spring and I was young and alone, again.

Summer

It was the summer of simmering shame. I moved to Minneapolis to crash on the couch of an old fling who gave me my first kiss. I didn’t think of The Fake Blonde at all, though the old fling would likely disagree. The temperature was strange: low seventies and still people were swimming in the lakes. I wore a sweater, bright blue, and laid out on the sand reading a book on managing your finances. My old fling was in the water, floating on his back and occasionally diving underneath the water to wet his hair.

The Fake Blonde was thinking of me. Once, while drunk, he sent me a selfie of him in some dingy club bathroom. The mirrors were scratched out, and multicolored Sharpie confessionals and illustrations lined the walls. I never responded. But later he posted an all-black Instagram story overlayed with the lyrics to Shura’s “What Happened to Us?”

You were somebody to me onceBut now you’re a fictionSomeone that I made up.

I found it a bit embarrassing, and maybe a little bit romantic, even though I was the one who had broken things off. After I viewed his story, The Fake Blonde immediately deleted it. The thought of him, drunken and vulnerable in the middle of the night waiting patiently for me to view his painful tribute made me nauseous. I left the couch and went to curl up beside my old fling, who wrapped his arm around me and cradled me through the rest of the night.

In the morning my old fling made breakfast and asked what I had planned for the day. “Searching for apartments,” I said. “and possibly applying for more jobs.” Instead, I took the train to the Mall of America and watched a movie alone then wandered the streets of St. Paul, gawking at the people who still had jobs and a strong sense of self.