Incidentally, it’s snowing again as I write this, the fat flakes drifting past the window of my dorm, which faces out onto a gothic quadrangle. Toby came down from Boston over the weekend, and my room still bears the unmistakable signs of his visit; some art book on Magritte his boyfriend insisted on sending along for me, even though I can’t imagine where he got the idea that I’m a fan of surrealist art. An inflatable mattress, which I’ve meant to return to the girl down the hall for days, except our schedules never seem to match up. And this fantastic picture from my eighteenth birthday that Toby taped up over my desk when I went to rinse out the French press in our hall kitchen.
Phoebe took the picture, twisting around in her seat on the roller coaster at the last moment, even though the Disneyland cast member was yelling at her to face front. It’s a blurry shot of Toby and me in the back row of the Thunder Mountain Railroad. Toby’s laughing at something Austin just said, and I’m almost but not quite looking at the camera. I’m smiling at Phoebe, at the whispered promises of that last summer, and the profound reluctance I’d discovered for leaving good people behind. But we had plenty of time for youthful indecision, both apart and together, for limping into the future past the unforgettable ash heaps of our histories.
I often wonder what will become of Cassidy Thorpe. She was the first of us to leave Eastwood, returning to the Barrows School that senior spring with what I can only imagine to be tales in which we’re all elaborately misrepresented. I can’t say I forgive her for refusing to indulge the perhapsness of what we might have been, but I understand why she chose to do it, and she never asked for my forgiveness.
She was right, though, in the end. I never should have given her so much credit. It all got tangled together, her appearance and Toby coming back into my life and the first time I ever read a book that spoke to me, and the question of who I wanted to be in the aftermath of my personal tragedy. Because I made a decision that year, to start mattering in a way that had nothing to do with sports teams or plastic crowns, and the reality is, I might have made that decision without her, or if I’d never fallen in love with a girl who considered love to be the biggest disaster of all.
The truth of it was, I’d been running the wrong experiment my whole life, and while Cassidy was the first person to realize, she didn’t add the elements that allowed me to proceed down a different path. She lent a spark, perhaps, or tendered the flame, but the arson was mine. Oscar Wilde once said that to live is the rarest thing in the world, because most people just exist, and that’s all. I don’t know if he’s right, but I do know that I spent a long time existing, and now, I intend to live.