What happened.

This is something from creative writing, which is to say that I wrote half of it over the summer and half of it about two days ago. It's more autobiographical than I meant it to be. Also I use some of the same imagery. Literary laziness.

She looked up. Craig was now waiting for her response. In the moment that she’d been gone in her own thoughts, the clouds had obstructed the sun and the afternoon had grown gloomy. She could no longer see her own shadow broken by the ripples of the pool water.

She realized that he had perhaps grown anxious. The question was unusual and serious coming from him, and it gave her a moment’s pause. She pulled her legs out of the pool and placed them to drip splotches onto the concrete.

She looked at her feet, noticing the paint chipping on her toenails, before answering.

“I don’t think so,” she began, then hesitated. What did she mean to say? “It would be the end of something—something pretty big. It wouldn’t be so easy, after that.” Another pause. He coughed—a forced burst of air. “What do you think?”

His response came quick and nonchalant, a boy’s reasoning.

“I think it’d be possible,” he said, by which he meant it’d be safe. “We’d still have things to talk about, stuff in common.” He gestured vaguely at the air, an action with which he intended to prove their camaraderie.

In the years that followed, as she grew into a woman wiser than her teenage self, she’d come back to that brief conversation and dissect it into moments. The question. Her silence. Then, her response. His response, so much more and less definitive at once. His friendly eagerness. She grew to resent him.

In the end, it was he who’d been right. But more and more she realized that it was she who’d given the better answer.

My first reaction was: that’s not what happened. I didn’t think it militantly, just: it wasn’t the truth. It wasn’t the truth, and she was beholden to the truth, wasn’t she? Writers are, to intangible concepts like that: truth, beauty, love. And she hadn’t been faithful.

Not to mention the other intangible concepts she hadn’t been faithful to.

Really, it was beyond even the question of leeway. She’d said an infinite number of times on the phone: I twist. It’s what I do. It’s why I write. I’d believed her justifications, her theoretical empathy and sympathy and I-can-do-whatever-the-hell-I-want-pathy, because up until now it hadn’t mattered, because up until now her reasons didn’t seem like blatant rationalizations for exploitation.

But that’s not what happened.

Of course I recognized myself: boyish, affable, maybe simple at times and ridiculous because of it. Maybe she thought I wouldn’t, which is why she sent the manuscript to me, as though it were any random story, any random character.

I recognized myself in the way she wrote about my coughing—she always mocked me for it, the way I got so visibly nervous. Tense, is the word she used. Tense, and then she’d scoff and push me into strained conversation: about mutual respect, about emotional development, about our parents. When I inevitably contrived answers out of a growing sense of panic, she’d call me out, call me naïve.

Here it was, on the page.

But her painted toenails hadn’t been chipped – she would never have let them get like that, back then. And she didn’t hesitate. She never has—she plunges into dialogue and attacks it, slices into it the way she did the pool after she’d answered me:

It would be the end of something. We wouldn’t need each other, after that. We would be separate, independent. It would take so much effort, and there’d be no real reason.

—And then she stood up and dove, one swift and savage motion. She was beside me, and then she was gone. I had been smiling. She must have thought I was a fool.

One more thing: it was a sunny afternoon. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. I know, because she was squinting as she talked. She wasn’t looking at me, but I could see her eyebrows furrowed, her expression pinched—as she talked and I gestured in vain, and she was looking into the sun, already staring firmly into the distance.

When it matters more than it did.

Late June, I think:

I will never forget, but I will never again be fooled by the radiance of skin salty-bitter-sweet.
Oh, how many words must be written to innocence before it dies crushed beneath the weight?
Idealism is not flattering on you, my dear.

I have a brush and a life somewhere, I say, and dig into my purse.

Was it you who promised to protect me in the never-here and the wasn’t-now?
I’m sorry.
I couldn’t hear you over the roar of tomorrow’s sunset and the thud, sickening, of my own mortality.
Forgive me if I fade before I speak.

It could have been worse, you said that night. It could have been us.
I would have laughed, but you were serious, then.

I ran so they could not see the veins on my ankles, the moisture messy beneath one eye—
Isn’t it true, love, that only poets and prostitutes get the endings they deserve?
My curtain call won’t be so sharp as to draw a gasp, and no, I didn’t bow in your direction.

You were never attentive enough to catch the raindrops before they broke on the surface of our words.
I resent you most of all, for that.