AFTER I SAID GOODBYE to my parents at the train station, I went home. To my aunt’s apartment.
To my apartment.
Change wasn’t always a bad thing, like my aunt had convinced herself to believe. It wasn’t always a good thing, either. It could be neutral—it could be okay.
Things changed, people changed.
I changed, too. I was allowed to. I wanted to. I was.
There were some things that stayed the same—the Monroe, for instance. It always sort of took my breath away as I came up to it, looking like it should be the main character in some whimsical children’s book series about a little girl. Maybe her name was Clementine. The building always had a door greeter, an older gentleman named Earl, who knew everyone’s name in the building, and always told them hello. The elevator always smelled like someone’s forgotten lunch, and the mirror on the ceiling always looked back at you a split second too late, and the Muzak was always awful.
“You’ll be okay,” I told the reflection, and she seemed to believe it.
The elevator let out on the fourth floor. I couldn’t remember how many times I’d rolled my suitcases down this hall, my wheels catching every knot and dent in the carpet. My passport would be in my hand, a flurry of travel guides tucked into my backpack. Seven years ago, I would have been just coming home from our European backpacking trip, tired and in desperate need of a shower, the rest of my life stretched before me like the good parts of a novel that the author had yet to write, and didn’t know how.
I had a degree in art history, something that really didn’t have a single path to take. I had thought about applying to be a curator. I’d mulled over becoming a gallerist. Perhaps try a graduate program. But none of it really ever caught hold of me. I figured nothing would. I had spent all summer painting through a tattered old copy of The Quintessential European Travel Guide that I’d swiped from a secondhand store in London, etching sceneries above recommended tourist traps and restaurants.
I had dropped my aunt off at her apartment, so tired my feet were numb, and hailed a taxi out front, not knowing someone else had just slipped inside. I’d opened the door and slid in, only to find the stranger looking at me with this bewildered expression.
He’d said I could take it, but I said he could, and we ended up finding out that we were both heading down toward NYU anyway, so why not go together and split the fare. The weight of my future had spread out in front of me now that I was on the ground again, in a city where I had to find a job and a future career and—all I could think about was The Quintessential European Travel Guide, and the mallet-hammer logo, and an idea began to form. He told me about the apartment he was about to rent with two of his friends, and how he was excited to be able to stay in the city. And then he asked me—
“How about you?” I couldn’t remember what he looked like—distressed jeans and a plain white shirt—but the day was mostly a blur. I’d met so many faces over the last few months, they all tended to blend together.
Even the ones that’d change my life.
“I think I want to work with books,” I told him, surprising even myself. “Is that weird?” I added with a self-conscious laugh. “I don’t know the first thing about book publishing! I must be crazy.”
And he smiled, and thinking back on it, I could almost remember his face then. The crookedness of his mouth. His kind eyes. And he said, “I don’t think so. I think you’re going to be amazing.”
It was that germ of an idea that, a few weeks later, had me applying to every job I could find in publishing. Everything that I was remotely qualified for. I just needed a foot in the door. I just needed a chance.
The next thing I knew, I was at a preliminary interview in a conference room at Strauss & Adder, sitting across from a woman so sharp and so bold, it was like she was made for red lipstick and leopard-print heels. And I knew instantly then that I wanted to be just like her—exactly like her. Someone who had their life together. Someone successful. Someone who knew themselves.
But in trying to be Rhonda, I’d never stopped to think about what parts of myself I’d shaved away.
I guess, sort of like James.
We had grown up, and grown apart, in different ways.
I came to a stop at apartment B4. My apartment. I took my keys out of my purse and turned the lock. I felt a hush of cool air as it opened—and my heart slammed into my chest. There was that feeling again. So slight, almost a figment of my imagination. The tingling of time across my skin as I stepped through the doorway, and into the past.
The apartment was dark, save for the golden afternoon sunlight streaming through the living room windows. Mother and Fucker were preening themselves on the AC. Everything was tidy, blankets folded and pillows puffed.
The blankets weren’t mine. And my aunt’s wingback chair was in the corner.
The apartment had brought me back again.
I quickly checked my phone for the date. Seven years ago, we’d be coming back today. Had I already missed him?
But when I turned into the kitchen, he was sitting at the table. In distressed jeans and a white T-shirt, the neck hole stretched out, and suddenly the man in the taxi came into focus. When he left, I’d meet him outside on the sidewalk. I’d catch a cab with him, and it made my heart ache at the realization that we had crossed each other, time and again, like ships in the night.
He looked up—and recognition lit his gray eyes. “Lemon . . .”
My body reacted before I could, and I hurried across the kitchen, and he pulled me close, burrowing his face into my stomach.
“Are you real?” he mumbled because I had disappeared in front of his eyes the last time he saw me. Every day I came back into the apartment, I’d hoped it’d bring me back so I could explain, but it never had.
I combed my fingers through his hair. I memorized how soft it felt, how his auburn curls hugged my fingertips. “Yes, and I’m sorry. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”
He leaned back a little, and looked up into my face with those lovely pale eyes. “Are you a ghost?”
I laughed, relieved, because, yes, I was and, no, I wasn’t, because it was complicated, because I knew what this feeling was now, warm and buoyant, and kissed him on the lips. “I want to tell you a story,” I replied, “about a magical apartment. You might not believe me at first, but I promise it’s true.”
And I told him a strange story, about a place between places that bled like watercolors. A place that felt, sometimes, like it had a mind of its own. I only told him the magical bits, the parts that clung to my bones like warm soup in winter. I told him about my aunt and the woman she loved across time, and her fear of good things going sour, and I told him about her niece, who was so afraid of something good that she settled for safe, that she shaved off so much of herself to fit the person she thought she wanted to be.
“Until she met someone in that terrible, lovely apartment who made her want just a little more.”
“They must have been very important to her,” he replied softly.
I ran my fingers down his face, memorizing the arch of his brows, the cut of his jaw. “He is,” I whispered, and he kissed me, long and savoring, like I was his favorite taste. I wanted to burrow myself in his touch, never come out again, but there was a part of me that tugged back to the present, where I belonged.
“But why seven?” he asked after a moment, his eyebrows furrowing. “Why seven years?”
“Why not? It’s a lucky number—or,” I added teasingly, “maybe it’s the number of rainbows you’ll see. Maybe it’s the number of flights you miss. The number of lemon pies you’ll burn. Or maybe it’s just how long you’ll wait before you find me again in the future.” I began to pull away when he grabbed my middle and drew me back in.
“I’ll never have to wait for anything if I never let you go,” he said earnestly, holding tightly to my hands. “We can stay here—forever.”
What a lovely thought. “You know we can’t,” I replied, “but you’ll find me in the future.”
His eyes grew steely. “I can find you now. Today. I’ll search everywhere. I’ll—”
“I wouldn’t be me, Iwan.”
Seven years ago, I would have been terrible for him. Twenty-two and fresh off my first real heartbreak, having gallivanted off with my aunt all summer, kissing every foreign boy I met in shadowy bars. Love wasn’t something that I looked for, it was something I made, over and over again, to try and forget the guy who broke my heart. I barely remembered his name now—Evan or Wesley, something middle-class and suburban, driving an eco-friendly car, with his eyes set on law school.
Seven years ago, I was someone else entirely, trying on different hats to see which one fit best, which skin I was comfortable with sharing.
Seven years ago, he was this bright-eyed dishwasher with soap under his nails, wearing overstretched shirts, trying to find his dream, and in the present, he was glossy and sure of himself, though when he smiled, the cracks showed, and they were cracks that most people probably didn’t want to see. But I loved them, too.
That was love, wasn’t it? It wasn’t just a quick drop—it was falling, over and over again, for your person. It was falling as they became new people. It was learning how to exist with every new breath. It was uncertain and it was undeniably hard, and it wasn’t something you could plan for.
Love was an invitation into the wild unknown, one step at a time together.
And I loved this man so much, I needed to let him go. This him. The one in my past.
Because the one in my present was just as lovely, though a little bit worn down, but also a little bit more, and I felt so silly now because I’d been comparing him to this man I had met in the past. I’d imagined he’d be just like this Iwan, only older. But we all change.
“But then who will I be in seven years, when you find me?” he asked, unsure, as if he was afraid of the person I’d meet.
But there was nothing to worry about.
“You,” I told him, bending down to press my forehead to his, soaking in every detail of this Iwan of before, this boy who hadn’t yet had a broken heart, who didn’t know the words to those kinds of songs yet. I wanted to hug him. I wanted to wrap him up in a blanket and ferry him through all of it. I wanted to be there for it—I wanted to be there for him. But I wouldn’t. Not for a long while.
“You are going to travel the world,” I said. “You’re going to cook widely and you’re going to absorb cultures and foods and stories like a sunflower drinks in the sun. And I think people will see a spark in you, and your passion for what you do, and someday you’ll make recipes people will write about in magazines, and you’ll host guests from all different walks of life, and you’ll make good food, and they’ll fall in love with it. With you.”
A smile played across his lips. “So you have met me in the future.”
“Yes,” I replied, and I memorized the way his cheek felt scratchy with five-o’clock shadow, the soft furrow in his brows as if he was trying not to cry.
“And you,” I whispered, a promise to him, “are going to be amazing.”
