The first installment of the fiction piece 5 Lovers.
We met in the living room of a mutual friend whose parents were off somewhere, and spent the rest of the night sitting on the back patio drinking from bottles and swinging our feet. Our conversation was occasionally interrupted by bursts of laughter from inside or the calls of someone who noticed we were gone. Smiling in the dim light, we waited them out, choosing not to be discovered. You acted as if you were grateful that I let you hang around, and I was attracted to your softness and sense of humor. We were inseparable immediately.
You had a car long before I could drive, and I had shotgun, always. You took me everywhere you went, and sideways glances and teasing punches filled the space in between us. You took a lot of things seriously that I didn’t understand. I would call you often with a restlessness that would haunt me for the next decade, and you would laugh and ask me if I ever studied. I didn’t.
You were deeply bothered by my indifference to music, and took it upon yourself to educate me. We lay shoulder to shoulder for hours on your bed, staring at the ceiling, listening, whispering, laughing, and listening. Whenever you drove me the short distance to my parents house you would take the long way, past the elementary school and along the arching road on the edge of the city. I lay across the bench seat with my head on your lap, trying not to visualize our progress. I grew insecure as I got older and your friendship consoled me.
Somewhere along the way you lost your vulnerability and your gentle nature followed. I tried to resist and hung on for too long, until one night you told me in frustration that you don’t love me anymore. I stood beside my car in the cold while you watched me from the window. The next time we spoke was months later, when you called to ask why I didn’t tell you I was moving away.
So many years later, in the corner of a crowded bar with sticky floors, I stole upward glances at the arch of your brow and the dark in your eyes; intimately familiar with the face of a person I do not know. I listened in awe as you recounted memories of us that I didn’t remember, while I silently wondered how the people we think we can’t live without become strangers. -Allie Jenkinson
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