I pulled up to his house with giddy anticipation. We were celebrating his birthday, and I got out of my car with cupcakes in hand. I was met by a lawn full of wishes. I plucked the tallest, roundest one, and closed my eyes, blowing the seeds apart-- mostly into my own face. They stuck gracelessly in my hair and eyelashes, and I giggled, shaking them off as I waited at the door for a face I see far too infrequently.
He appeared, and we embraced for a long while. I felt an ease come over me that I hadn't felt in too long, a happiness I scarcely could contain. How can you contain it when you're so close to the things you've wanted for longer than you're willing to admit?
I left the cupcakes in the kitchen and we sat for a while on opposite couches, catching each other up on our day-to-day lives. How busy he has been. How busy I have been. We covered the bullet points of the Venn diagram of us, focusing on the middle-- the things and people we have in common. We talked about the foreseeable future-- about the career he is preparing for, and the one I'm hoping to embark on.
"I really hope you get it," he said.
"I'm too scared to think about it too deeply. To really want it," I said.
"Why?" he asked.
"Then it becomes real. Hope is dangerous. It's dangerous to want so much."
We both smiled, caught off-guard by what I'd said without exactly meaning to say it. I looked away.
We spent the lovely afternoon that we had both desperately needed. We played childhood games, laughing at silly jokes that no one else ever seems to appreciate. I sang a bashful solo "Happy Birthday" over a half-dozen chocolate and vanilla cupcakes. "This is where I make a wish?" he asked.
I immediately flashed back to another spring, another birthday, sitting in his car, in the unseasonable cold. That was the night we had first discovered our mutual feelings for one another, and I'd remembered that I still had birthday candles in my purse from my best friend's party weeks before. I retrieved a candle, though neither of us carried a lighter.
"Well, make a wish anyway," I had said, holding a single white birthday candle between my thumb and forefinger. It all felt like the end of a John Hughes movie.
He knew better than to question it, and closed his eyes, blowing the imaginary flame between us. A few moments went by, with me nestled against his chest. "I'm surprised you didn't ask me what I wished for," he said.
I looked him in the eye. "If I ask, then it won't come true."
Our lips found each other for the first time. The first taste of magic.
"That's what I wished for," he had laughed, running his fingers through my long, straight hair.
Extraneous memory, I thought, back in the present, in his kitchen again. "This is where you make your wish," I confirmed. "Wish wisely."
He closed his eyes and blew out the very real flames that flickered over three of the cupcakes. We chose our flavors. "I can't tell you what it is," he teased.
"Nope," I said, scooping a bit of chocolate frosting off with my finger.
He sat next to me on the couch, and held out his arm for me. I froze. So close to the things you've wanted. I quietly buried my head in his chest, listening to the familiar, unfamiliar beating of his heart. So long ago. We curled up into one another, in an innocent intimacy that I thought we'd grown too old and jaded for. So many thoughts echoed. Safe. Warm. The right things always come back around.
"I owed you a cuddle," he explained.
"Right," I giggled. "This is for me."
"I don't know how things are going to play out," he said, "but... you're special. The way you speak. Your intelligence. Your fire. I wish I had just a little bit of that fire."
I laughed. "You are fire! I've never seen anyone push themselves like you do."
"Not like you," he sighed.
I squinted reflexively. "You really don't see yourself, do you?" It was rhetorical, but it had finally dawned on me. He'd been pushing himself to prove a worth that, although intrinsic to me, was a blind spot for him. It felt, for a moment, like the stories of our grandmothers, waiting patiently for the loves of their lives to return from war. Only the war was man against himself.
"I have met so many people. I've dated..." I trailed off. In the interim, I had even fallen very much in love. "But the bottom line is... nobody is you."
He pulled me closer, nuzzling his face into my hair. "Nobody is you," he mused. "No matter what happens, whether we end up together or not, I could never forget you. I mean, there are far better out there than I. But I'll never find another Katie."
"There aren't," I said. I've always hated when he says those things. I never know whether he has placed me on an undeserved pedestal, or if there is a subtext I'm afraid to read-- but I don't like the thought of either. "And even if there are, why would I ever deserve better than you?"
"Because you're Katie."
"The world is full of Katies."
"I mean, I may meet other Katies, but none of them will ever be you. Nobody is you."
We sat together for a long while. He pulled me close, listening to me inhale and exhale, and I held him, words failing me. It's the simple things, I thought, that make life's complexities bearable.
"Do you ever wonder what if?" I asked. He emboldens me.
"Of course I do. All the time." His eyes burned into mine. "Just because I'm not always around doesn't mean I don't think about you. I just don't ever want to hurt you."
"Don't worry about me," I sighed. "I think I've already done all the crying over you that I'll ever do."
I remembered so many similarities in the way it had ended. He had told me I was the first person he thought about when he woke up in the morning and the last on his mind when he went to sleep at night.
I had said everything I needed to say, and probably more, reasoning to him, and to myself, that I didn't want to be the one with regrets someday. "That means something," I had told him. "You don't find that all the time. You don't just walk away from that."
But he did.
Ours is a love story that has spanned across springs, across too many empty seasons. Years go by, and they do so with more urgency. They build up speed; they gather momentum. More candles top our cakes. Maybe they're just enough to wish on now.
But I know, deep down, what happens next. For now, he will go back to his life, to working tirelessly to prove of himself things that I have never questioned. And I will go back to tirelessly throwing spaghetti at the wall of my own life, just maybe daring to hope a little harder for the things I know to be real-- for the things I already want too much.
But there is a point on the horizon where I have long seen our paths meeting. It is impossible to tell where. Maybe it is merely an optical illusion. Maybe it's akin to a mirage when you're dying of thirst, alone in a desert, and all you can think about is lifesaving water. But I wonder if I will find him there, someday, at the vanishing point.
Goodbyes have never been our forte. It's always been the emotional equivalent of pulling magnets apart. And no matter how many hours we while away together, it always comes too soon.
We stood on his lawn, and without a word, he plucked a dandelion, blowing its seeds far and wide, his wishes vanishing with them into thin air.
Someday, I figure, we will see where they land.
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