Why did I let myself love him, let myself be with him? Everything I felt with him, felt for him—all the things I told him that I’d never told anyone else—in spite of all that, I wasn’t and would never be enough for him. He woke me up, he made me come alive, but Lindsay did that for him.
Did everything that happened between us mean anything? Was our whole relationship a lie?
I fall into my car and the world roars with too much silence, and it ends right outside where it began. In Zach’s father’s movie store.
Because he still loves her.
It was always her.
I don’t remember when anything has hurt so much.
AFTER
January
I pretend to busy myself with something in my car until Zach disappears back into Raj’s mother’s restaurant. And then I sink lower in my seat and close my eyes.
“Zach,” I whisper, and wait for the sound of his voice.
“Zach,” I say again, more loudly. Open my eyes and he’s still not anywhere around. I think of “Air on the G String.” Our song.
I hum it, and there is still nothing.
“Zach!” I yell into my car.
“MyZach,” I say. “Memory Zach?”
Nothing.
He doesn’t appear in my passenger seat out of thin air. He doesn’t appear across the street and walk toward me.
Not his flapping red puff of hair, not his crazy bright smile, not even his cigarette. Nothing.
And suddenly I’m remembering what he asked me in the diner on Saturday night:What do you think happens when you find him?
And what he said that morning we drove to school together.
Don’t forget about me.
How nervous he was that he wouldn’t exist anymore if I found the real Zach.
But I didn’t forget. I didn’t. Just because I talked to the real Zach, I…
I never meant to make him go.
We didn’t even say goodbye.
He didn’t know it would be the last time he existed.
Zach, Zach, Zach.
“Where are you?” I say out loud, feeling a surge of panic begin to build in my chest. “Come back.”
The noise of my car’s heater whirs a warm silence back atme.
“Come back,” I whisper to it. To no one.
To myself.
