I tried to pick up the trail. “But?”
“But I don’t like it, okay? I don’t like how everything is changing. It’s like when you’re a kid, you think that things like the holidays are meant to show you how things always stay the same, how you have the same celebration year after year, and that’s why it’s so special. But the older you get, the more you realize that, yes, there are all these things that link you to the past, and you’re using the same words and singing the same songs that have always been there for you, but each time, things have shifted, and you have to deal with that shift. Because maybe you don’t notice it every single day. Maybe it’s only on days like today that you notice it a lot. And I know I’m supposed to be able to deal with that, but I’m not sure I can deal with that. Like us, Dash. Look at us. I mean, at first when we were together, it was like there wasn’t such a thing as time, right? We were so much in the present that it was never going to be any different—it was all about finding out, and not so much about knowing. It was all so intense and all so immediate, and I think maybe I thought, okay, this is what having a boyfriend I really like is all about. And then, this is what having a boyfriend I love is all about. But then time comes into it, and it’s not as immediate, and it’s not as intense, and you can’t help but feel that something’s getting lost there, right? The same as when someone moves away. Or isn’t around anymore. Maybe you’re okay with that something being lost, Dash. Maybe you don’t care. But I care, Dash. I care a lot. Because I feel it a lot. And I don’t have any idea what to do about it.”
“Neither do I!” I confessed. “I have been trying for months to figure out a way to make it better, Lily. And the only answer I can come up with is to tell you there are some things you can’t control, and time is, like, number one on that list. Number two is the actions of other people. I watched my father destroy my mother—absolutely destroy her. And then I watched them both destroy their marriage and the entity that was the only thing I’d ever known as family. I know I was only eight, but even if I’d been eighteen, there wouldn’t have been anything I could do but protect myself. I wanted to do anything I could, but the answer was to realize that it was not something that I got to decide. Even now. I cannot change my father. And I want to, so badly. I will even admit to you now that one of the reasons I want to change my father is because I feel that if I can change everything that’s wrong with him, then maybe I can change all those parts in me, too. Isn’t that scary? But isn’t it also natural, to want that?”
“You never told me that.”
“I know! But I’m telling you now—I’m telling you all of this now—because I know there are all of these things happening to you where what you feel is, as I said before in the wrong way, beside the point. You can’t stop time. You can’t make everyone healthy or always in love. You can’t. But you and me—what we have—that’s one thing we do have control over. That’s the one thing that’s up to us. There are times when it feels to me like it’s all up to you. And I’m sure there are times for you when it feels like it’s all up to me. But we have to move forward like it’s up to us, together. I know it’s not as intense or immediate as it used to be—but that just means that instead of having only a present together, we’re having a past, present, and future all at once.”
Lily softened then. I could see it. She wasn’t giving up. She wasn’t giving in, per se. But she was understanding. I was feeling the same way. How had we never had this conversation before?
Probably because we hadn’t been ready for this conversation before.
“It’s not fair,” Lily said, walking over to me and leaning in. “What’s the one thing we want when it comes to the people we love? Time. And what’s the scariest thing about how love goes? Time. The thing we want the most is the thing we fear the most, I guess. Time is going to run out. But in the meantime we have…everything.”
She hugged me then, and I hugged her back, and we probably would have stayed like that for a very long time if Inga the caterer hadn’t come in at that moment.
“I promise I wasn’t listening,” she said, which pretty much guaranteed she’d been listening. “I just need to get the cheese puffs out of the oven before they become cheese puffeds.”
As we walked back down the hall to the party, I explained Boomer’s Theory of the Blink to Lily. She liked it.
“We had our blink,” she said.
“Yup.”
“And now our eyes are open.”
“Or eye.”
“Or eye.”
“And inevitably—”
“We’ll blink again.”
“But that’s okay.”
“Because things will be clearer after we do.”
“Precisely.”
We got to the door of the party. Friends, family, and strangers spread before us. There was a music to their conversation—this strange orchestration of good company.
I reached for her hand. She took mine.
“Let’s do this,” I said. “All of it.”