She's eighteen and he tells her "I love you" and she thinks oh no.
She believes in love-she's not jaded, like she could be with a dad disappear and a mom who works long hours. She's grown up watching the greatest love story untold from the sidelines of her best friend's parents. She's watched her mom fall in love with someone new, someone worn around the edges with a fragile smile and a sheltered heart. She believes in love, knows one day she will be in love and it might be with this boy who has kind eyes and a temper that scares her sometimes-not because he could hurt her, but because of how much he will hate himself from losing control.
She's eighteen, and she's got the world at her finger tips-she's got college and a life that she has yet to live, just waiting to be written. She's eighteen and this boy who she thinks she could love but is not in love with him stands in front of her too tall, too kind with a smile that is almost heartbreaking because she believes him.
See he's her best friend-one of five, and he's been through puberty with her, he's seen her at her worse and her best and memories tangle up and she can't really remember a time before him and if there is a time after (she knows there will be an after) she will feel it like a phantom limb.
"Please don't" she says. It's a cruel kindness, and she says it feeling like her heart has frozen. Frostbite on her fingers and if she could she still wouldn't take it back because she's eighteen and she has a life she has yet to live and she will not let a nineteen year old Texas boy in New York hold her back.
See she's not a tragic romance, or something feel good you watch on TV. This is her life and she is too young to have someone tell her he loves her and mean it the way Katy and Shawn mean it, the way Corey and Topanga mean it. The way Smackle and Farkle think they mean it. The way Riley says it each time she meets a new girl who makes her best friend light up like Christmas.
[did you fall in love with me?]
She's twenty-three, with an ill-advised tattoo on her wrist from the time she and Zay got drunk off of cheap wine when she spent a summer in Rome on a painting trip, while Zay was scouting the newsets location for his next critically acclaimed darling.
She’s cut her hair short, to her shoulders after a break up with a guy who bought her a ring and told her he loved her and she almost-almost believed him. See twenty-three is a lot different than eighteen, and twenty-three means kisses are simply kisses not a marriage proposal like high school and they drank the same beer, voted the same way and both liked collecting post cards of places they’ve never been to.
He was perfect but he talked about a future, about roots-somewhere to grow old and it made her throat clench, it made her heart hurt. She called Riley in the middle of the night, hiding in the bathtub because the Chicago apartment she shared with the guy who wanted her to take his last name didn’t have a bay window and she cried and cried about how she’s not ready she’s not ready.
Riley is amazing, and stable. She’s saving the world, working an internship at CNN, asking real questions, trying to save the world. Riley tells her, in the dead of the night with the distance of the phone making her best friend feel both a million miles away and right by her side, that maybe she doesn’t really love him if she’s not ready.
It’s like a bubble burst, like she pulls the rip cord and she’s no longer free falling.
“But marriage is important,” she says.
“Not if getting marry gives you anxiety.”
Breaking up with was hard, and she doesn’t want to think she didn’t love him, that three years of sleeping with the same guy, making food, playing video games and going to art shows and hikes and Netflics marathons meant nothing.
But maybe, maybe twenty-three might mean you know a bit more about love than eighteen but it’s still not enough.
[can you remember when you looked at me and thought the rest of my life?]
She’s a bridesmaid at Smackle’s wedding to Charlie, and she hates the colour her dress is but she loves Smackle and is ambiguous towards Charlie. She’s seen Smackle cry and watched how she and Farkle burnt each other out and she thinks sometimes the people perfect on paper just don’t go the distance and it’s okay.
Farkle seems okay, waltzing her around the dance floor, no sign of awkwardness that he’s at his ex-girlfriend’s wedding.
“How are you okay with this?” she asks because she can’t understand this at all. Riley is trying to teach Smackle how to tango, which goes exactly how you’d think.
Farkle looks different now, grown up and into his skin-twenty-five fits him much better than thirteen where he was awkward lengths, and unaware of how to move his body. “She’s happy,” he told her, spinning her around so the purple of her satin skirt flares up. “That’s all I’ve ever wanted for her.”
“Even if she’s with someone else?” Maybe it’s painful and rude but she wants to understand how you could love someone so much and try so hard for so many years and just not get it to work out. She’s watched Farkle and Smackle play out for over ten years, and she had thought if there was a hope in hell of replaying the Corey and Topanga it would be them.
But Farkle and Smackle couldn’t weather graduation-Farkle going to work at his father’s company and Smackle in post grad and some rifts become valley that are just too low to cross.
“Yeah,” Farkle nods and there’s no sign of wistfulness, nothing that makes her think he wants Smackle bad. It’s a weird feeling in her stomach when she realizes you might love someone very much but not want to be with them again.
[i really need to know]
She christens the New Year waking up in a bed that isn’t her own in Philadelphia after the Matthews Family New Year’s party. She’s a bit hung over and a bit sleepy and cold because her bedmate stole all the covers. Fourteen year old her would be beside herself with joy, because last night after years of wanting-and a lot of sexual tensions she finally fucked Josh Matthews.
And it did not live up to expectations. It wasn’t bad sex, but it wasn’t the best she’s ever had and she just doesn’t know how to process this.
She’s twenty-six and she doesn’t want to date Josh Matthews-she’s had one night stands before, she’s had fuck buddies and drunken sex. That isn’t the issue.
The issue is there is something that makes her feel so sad about last night, like she’s hyped this night-Josh-up so much in her mind over the years that when it finally happened (because it was never an if, always a when) it just fell short.
Kind of like finding out that there was someone in the suits of Mickey in Disney World or Santa at the mall was just some old guy. It’s something from her childhood that she painted rosy colours getting the light of day and it’s all faded and worn.
She doesn’t think it was a mistake last night-sex with her, is rarely ever a mistake. But she does think it just proved something right because she loved Josh-she did. She loved her the way a fourteen year old falls in love, burning on the back for ten years until it finally boiled over in a mess in his apartment where he missed throwing the wrapper of the condom in the bin. And now it’s just nothing.
Love can just become nothing.
It’s a sobering thought, one that hurts her head so much that when she stumbles into the kitchen she bangs around loud enough to wake Josh up so he also gets to deal with the hangover.
[because i don’t know when i fell in love with you]
Copper Ridge is a small farming town near the border of Texas, and she doesn’t know why she felt so compelled to take vacation days off of work ( her students are thrilled, Cubism isn’t for everyone). She could call him-skype him, facebook him. There are modes of conversation and while they’ve drifted a bit over the years-distance, him going through vet school and her through teacher’s college and her masters, they’ve still been friends.
They’ve still been friends even though he told her he loved her when she was eighteen and she told him no. They’ve never talked about it, it’s not something you talk about she doesn’t think. Or rather it wasn’t when she was eighteen. It was something to be buried. Maybe now it’s not.
He picks her up in a blue pickup truck and he smiles at her warmly. She surprises them both when she hugs him because she’s not a hugging person. She likes arms distance between people unless she’s the one who brings them close.
She’s got a lot of questions. And she doubts he knows the answer. Ten years is a long time, she’s grown up, he’s grown up and she’s not really sure what she’s asking and if she should be asking.
But maybe this is what love is.
Or as close as she’s gotten to understanding it since she was eighteen.