CHAPTER 20

Being in Love

It was summer. She spent so much time in the sun. If she heard love songs she sat with them. She’d blink them if she could. Sometimes she’d tear up at long lines like “At laaaastt.” If she were in front of people she’d hold back the tears. Swallow them away because she knew that you couldn’t tell someone how good it felt to sit with those songs. You couldn’t say, “I’m blinking each one of these songs.”

She and John got ice cream and walked by the river. She and John slept in on Sundays and ate bagels. She and John said “I love you” as they’d part and hang up the phone and sometimes while kissing and sometimes while cooking. She and John held each other’s elbows and took silly baths. She and John ate pizza and went to shows and once they went dancing and spun. She and John frequented fairs and the inside of each other’s body outline as they’d sleep pushed up against each other. She and John walked home and got dressed up and did so much listening to each other speak.

On Saturday they went to a parade and Leda got cotton candy. John took a picture of her eating it, and she thought she looked pretty holding it and taking a bite. It was so pink and her face looked bright. She posted it on Facebook later and got fifteen likes.

They stopped at a bookstore, and she bought The Possibility of an Island. It ended up horizontal in her bookshelf over the Noam Chomsky, but she did read it.

They walked back to his apartment, and she skipped a little. There was the sound of passing cars on the busy road silencing into the quiet of his road as they turned the familiar corner. There was a fence post they passed, the white of the paint chipped and blurring as they walked. He lifted her over a puddle. She laughed and looked back at everything behind them growing farther and farther away as she tried to balance herself over his shoulder.

They had sleepy sex when they got home, and the room was hot and dusty. Afterward she held her legs up in the air.

“I hate my legs,” she said.

“I don’t,” he said.

She went to turn on his fan. The floor, the pine boards so emblematic of the room and the blue of the walls. Her hand pressed up on the windowsill and the cool air of the window fan as she turned it on.

She lay down back beside him with her face on his chest.

“I just wish it could be like this forever,” she said.

“I think it can be,” he said.

“You think it can be this good forever?”

“Yes,” he said.

“But how?”

And John said something back, but she couldn’t hear him over the fan.