It does feel like the first time.
I try to be careful with her, and the funny thing is—she tries to be careful with me. Her teeth graze my bottom lip, my shoulders, my arms, but she never bites down. She stops herself before her nails dig too deep into my back.
But I’d let her break me apart, if she wanted.
I’m gone the second she is, and something in me does shatter when she comes, my name on her lips—but not in a bad way.
In this way that tells me my heart was only ever supposed to be pieces she could hold in those tiny hands, anyway.
Not the first time, but she kisses me afterwards, tentative, like it’s new, and I think every single kiss with her is. Later, her laughter echoes into the dark room, her fingers trace portraits on my skin, and I think I’d be more than happy for my last everything to belong to her.
Bohdan
I’ve lived a few different lives in my thirty years on earth, but the most important ones were the ones I lived at night.
On the ice and under all those lights in college, skating with Talon and Jay. Somehow the best on the entire planet at the thing I loved the most, but then loved second after I saw her through the glass one time.
Sneaking into Sloan’s dorm room after games, suit still on and half askew because I never bothered to put it back on properly—I was too focused on getting to her.
Other nights playing under other lights with a different jersey, that same girl still watching me from behind different glass, still the best according to everyone else, but the only thing I wanted to be best at was Sloan.
Coming home to her in that apartment with the floor-to-ceiling windows, the view of the Sound and the Olympics and all that Seattle had to offer. But what that apartment really had to offer me was nights with that girl—usually on the couch, textbooks all around, music on low, her socked feet kicking inthe air, chin propped up in one hand, dark hair fanning around her face, and blue eyes more beautiful than any body of water anywhere in the world.
Her face softening when she’d tilt her lips up to brush mine, smiling, loving me in this quiet way that somehow felt louder and more all-encompassing than anything I’d ever experienced, and ever would again.
Now I live this life, in an objectively nice apartment in Brooklyn, because I refuse to live near the studio headquarters in Secaucus, but nothing particularly important happens at night anymore.
Drinking ginseng or turmeric tea because my mom read somewhere it was good for brain health, and now I can’t go a month without new kinds showing up at my door.
Practicing mindfulness.
Taking my antidepressants, and sometimes a sedative if I’ve had a particularly rough day.
Trying all sorts of migraine-prevention techniques that probably don’t work.
But it is the one time a day I let myself open my wallet and pull out the picture of Sloan.
My therapist says I need to stop doing that. Can’t move on if I’m staring at the past each night before bed.
I think he’d probably sing a different tune if his past was Sloan Joseph.
It’s also the one time a day I let myself take an active stroll down memory lane. It’s pretty hard to avoid Sloan in all things because she is all things—at least all the things that matter.
Talon and Jay would tell me it’s pathetic. It is. I know it is.
But tonight, it doesn’t stop me from dropping my bag, yanking off my tie, grabbing a beer I shouldn’t have, and climbing the wrought-iron stairs to the rooftop so I can sit out there under all the stars and look at the brightest one that lives in my wallet.
A breeze lifts my hair from my face, cool against my skin, and it feels for a second like it might be a nice reprieve from the pounding starting along my hairline, but nothing’s ever hurt more than looking at all the things I used to have.
I take a swig of beer before dropping into the lounge chair in the middle of the rooftop. Stretching my legs out, I inhale before fishing out my wallet, finding the picture right behind my ID, where it always stays safe.
I could keep it anywhere, really. But there’s something about the fact that all I have left of her lives alongside this stupid piece of plastic that’s supposed to tell people who I am.
She forged me, after all.
The edges of the Polaroid are worn, starting to peel, not from lack of care on my part—this picture with her old number scrawled across the back is probably my most prized possession—but from time.
Funny thing, time.
