1.
Jean shorts and a tank top despite the cold, the rain. We booked it back to her room when the first torrent struck but got soaked to the bone anyway. If I had been paying any attention, I would have seen it coming: the thunderstorm and the breakup.
We’re sitting on her floor, her long hair dripping intermittently onto the rug. I can feel the water squelch in my socks. We’ve been officially dating for three months, the unofficial runtime stretching back much further.
I watch her lips as I wait for her to speak. They’re chapped. They always are in winter; she can never hold on to lip balm for more than five minutes without losing it. My hand digs in my pocket for mine, finds it, holds it out to her, and replaces it when she shakes her head no. Be that way.
Words elude her. In the past, she’s resorted to clichés. She once told me I was “the bee’s knees.” When I flew home for the weekend, she said, “absence makes the heart grow fonder.” She said she loved me three weeks after we met.
She picks at her turquoise nail polish. I track the flakes as they settle on the floor. “I hope you understand I’m not the only fish in the sea,” she says.
2.
This time, both of us are astronauts. We’ve been training our whole lives for today, and here we are: liftoff. I’m shaking, and she puts her hand over mine to buckle my seatbelt. The click comforts me, and I return her lopsided smile.
Our schedules are packed from dawn to dusk, but we make time. Our first kiss is in front of a view of the entire planet. When she holds me, not even gravity can impose itself between us. The other astronauts videochat with their spouses whenever they want, but I know they’re rabidly jealous when I reach out and pluck a fallen eyelash off her cheek. We don’t blow it away (the air recycling forbids it), but we make a wish anyway.
When she breaks up with me, she does not tell me she “needs some space,” but I wish she had. Our situation is too ridiculous to be serious. Instead, she talks extensively about the pressures of work, of being away from her family. At the next crew dinner, she avoids eye contact while I count the number of times I chew each bite of our individually pre-packaged meals.
Our crewmates seem pleased to swap their envy for pity. They wince every time I open my mouth, bracing themselves to hear heartache they have no patience for. We all have work to do. It’s another three months before we go back down, and when I cry, the tears form saltwater spheres around my eyes.
3.
I’m a Renaissance oil painter, and she’s my muse. Women in my classes lament that we aren’t allowed to paint male figures, but contemplating the female form never bothered me. She and I make extra appointments after hours, and I start a series cataloging her collarbones. I touch her to position her chin, lingering for longer than strictly necessary. This is how it begins: my hand in her hair splays as she pushes her head back into it, her neck flexed, my fingernails on her scalp, lightly.
When she invites me to her house for dinner, I’m nearly too bashful to say yes. I’m unfamiliar with the choreography of wealth, so she teaches me which forks to use in what order, when to compliment the estate, and how to answer questions about my family. It works like a charm: her parents adore me.
They take me with them on their annual trip to the coast. The beach is irresistible, the sunsets miraculous in their audacity. We lounge on the sand, trying to toss grapes into each other’s mouths. There is nothing but passion and the time to savor it. She reads me her favorite poems, and I fill a sketchbook with just her silhouette.
After only a year, she becomes enchanted by a convent in Tuscany. She never wanted to marry, and this way she doesn’t have to. I wish I could be happy for her, but they allow no decorative possessions and no lovers in the house of God.
4.
We’re rivals in the Wild West. She’s a ranger famous for catching outlaws, and I’m the most notorious robber of them all. We circle each other for years, hearing stories, hiding our curiosity, before we finally meet. When she catches up with me, I offer her a whiskey. She grimaces as she sips, but her voice is steady as she challenges me to a game of poker. I accept. As we play, I memorize every tiny shiver in her face, every furrow of her arched eyebrows. I can’t resist letting her win. When we flip over our final cards, the righteous satisfaction rolls off her in waves. She lists my crimes with a knife to my throat. I grin, and when she looks into my eyes, she can’t bring herself to kill me.
We see each other in fits and starts for years, each time electric with the expectation that it’d be the last. We are the only ones who understand each other, our need for the chase. Even so, I would give it all up to be with her. I don’t say it in words, but she sees the look in my eyes one humid July evening when I spot her across the saloon. She shakes her head once very quickly, and we never see each other again.
5.
We’re stray cats adopted by the same family. We spend our days sleeping in pools of sunshine, and we have enough to eat every night. We spend almost all our time touching in some way: paws kneading fur, or whiskers brushing, or tails intertwined. Her favorite activity is watching the street outside the living room window, her absinthe eyes tracking the cars as far as she can into the distance. She paws at the second-floor windows as birds build treetop nests.
One day, I find a mouse in the attic and give it to her to hunt. I wish I hadn’t. She doesn’t let it die for days, and there is no going back after that. It’s obvious by the way she paces down the hallway that her escape has become inevitable. She tries to convince me to come with her but doesn’t try very hard. I watch her squeeze through an open window and drop the two stories to the sidewalk. She lands unharmed but walks back into a lifespan a quarter of what we could have had together.
6.
I’m a ghost haunting her house. I water her plants for her when she forgets. I try not to watch her sleep, but I get so bored. Sometimes, she brings friends over, and it’s an ice-cold shock to remember that there is a world full of people out there. I don’t like her friends. If she was the only person I saw for the rest of my afterlife, I would be satisfied.
I go about the gestures of haunting, but she’s too much of a skeptic and it’s getting embarrassing. I cut the faces out of the photos in her newspaper, she forgets to read it. I steal her jewelry, she assumes she’s misplaced it and responds with a shrug. I turn the radio on and off, she thinks it’s a glitch and doesn’t have the interest to look into it. I’m not powerful enough to change anything about her life enough to make her care, so I spend my days tracing the outline of her profile, my finger a fraction of an inch away from touching her skin.
This isn’t something a healthy person would do, but it’s okay because I’m long-dead. I have no choice but to spend all my time thinking about her. Ghosts don’t sleep, so nobody can blame me for sitting on the floor next to her nightstand, watching each rise and fall of her chest like a new revelation. I hope she would be flattered that it’s possible for someone to love her this much, but that’s not how she would react. I know her too well. Her first emotion would be shock, bleeding into pity, bleeding into disgust.
7.
In this one, we’re high school sweethearts. She ends things the day after graduation at the ice cream shop where we had our first date. She says something about different forms of intimacy, how I’ll be just fine, and why she needs to find herself as an adult before she can settle down. I never stop loving her. I follow her to the East Coast for college, and we are roommates for half a dozen painful years. We never talk about it, but I have a sneaking suspicion that she doesn’t care enough to gossip about me.
Everyone in my life tells me I have to move out, but I wait for her to make the decision. I move through life looking for moments she would love, like the hummingbird nest I see on a walk one day and the vintage brooch I don’t have the money to buy for her. I keep lists (her favorite flower is a forget-me-not, her favorite movie is Mary Poppins, her favorite soda is orange cream), so I never ask the same question twice.
Every year, she and her partner invite me to their New Year’s Eve party. I show up on time, and they’re never ready. I can’t help myself: I help set up the chairs, I help plate the snacks, and I help welcome guests into their home. By the end of the night, she’s too drunk and sprawls asleep on the couch. As time passes, the champagne gets more expensive, the couch cushions more tasteful. One year I’m more obvious than usual, my eyes on her lips, the hem of her silk slip dress, the smudge of her pink lipstick. She giggles why are you looking at me like that? Even though she already knows. Does she want me to say it? I’m yours waits on the tip of my tongue. I would give anything for you to kiss me sticks to the roof of my mouth. I shake my head, say nothing. I think: you will be my undoing.
8.
What about if we never meet? I sit somewhere else on the first day of psychology class. She is exactly the same as every other beautiful girl whose name I don’t learn. I fall in love with a different person. She breaks my heart too, but it’s less devastating.
When my neighbor mentions her hometown, it doesn’t affect me at all. When she gets married, I do not hear about it from mutual friends I do not have. Maybe I see her on the street, years after we do not meet, and I’m struck by the way she scrunches her nose when she smiles. Or maybe she never once takes up space in my mind.
9.
It’s only one out of a trillion timelines that I break up with her instead, and the reason is still that she doesn’t want to be with me. It doesn’t matter; I have the self-respect to make her listen to one of the speeches I wrote in my notes app. She stands the whole time, wringing her hands and staring at her boots. I cling to the fact that I was the one who walked away. I nod when I see her on campus. Eventually, I smile.
10.
She tells me she doesn’t love me during a thunderstorm. I cry on the bench where we had our first kiss. I cry on the floor of my dorm room. I cry in front of her and seven of our friends. I feel like shit way after I should already be over it.
One Sunday, I stop imagining what would have happened in another universe.
I’m sitting on a roof, the terracotta tiles pressing ridges into my legs. It’s winter, and I let myself shiver, relaxing into the rhythm of my teeth knocking together. I used to say I am nothing if not a romantic, and when she told me “it’ll pass,” I wanted to prove her wrong. Yes, I have found something better than proving her wrong –– when I think about her, she’s not the goddess at whose feet I used to grovel. It’s not that I never miss her, but that those thoughts are never prayers.
I breathe out and watch the puff of warmth dissolve into the night. I tilt my head back, let the wind brush the curls from the nape of my neck. I search the constellations for my own zodiac.