Robin York - Deeper

We hold hands until the moment is finally here when he has to go and I have to stay and we can’t hold hands anymore.

He drops his backpack on the ground and pulls me into his arms.

I can’t think of words to tell him that mean anything. It’s easy, with my body, to press up against him. To rub my damp eyelashes against his shirt, feel his lips on the crown of my head, his arms so tight around me.

I won’t tell him I wish he didn’t have to go. There’s a little girl on the other side of the country who needs him. There’s a place he fits into, a life that’s not this life, and I can’t question the claim it has on him. I don’t have the right.

I can wish things were different. I’ve wished it a thousand times. But as long as they’re not different, this is the way it is, and I won’t tell him I wish he would stay.

“Hey,” he says.

I look up at his face. I push my hands up his neck, cover his ears where they stick out because he’s wearing his black baseball cap. He’ll get on a plane next to some lady who thinks he’s an anonymous college dude, nobody important. She won’t know that he’s everything.

“I’ll miss your ears,” I tell him.

“I’ll miss that gap in your teeth.”

“I never did show you how I could spit through it.”

“That’s all right. We found some other stuff to do with our time.”

That makes me smile, which makes him smile, and we just look at each other. I study how his eyes crinkle at the corners, how deep the lines sink in around his lips, how nice his teeth are. His slightly crooked nose. The smile fades away, leaves his mouth so serious, as serious as his eyes.

I pet his ears. Pinch his earlobes.

“I don’t know how to do this,” I tell him.

“There isn’t a way. We just do it.”

I reach for the brim of his cap, pivot it all the way around on his head, and go up on my tiptoes to kiss him.

Goodbye. I’m kissing West goodbye.

His hand clamps down on the back of my neck. His tongue moves into my mouth and the kiss goes deep, deeper, until we reach the place where there’s no boundary between us. The place where I’ve given him a piece of my heart, my soul, a prayer flag with soft, fraying edges that flaps in the wind, claims him as my own, forever.

I tell him, with this kiss, that I want him to be well. That I want him to thrive. I want him to use his mind and his hands, his curious restless energy, his creativity—to put them in service of something that feeds his soul.

I tell him I want him to remember to eat, to make good bread, to pay attention to what he does with his days, what he puts into his body, what feeds him.

I tell him I love him, and my love means I want him to be happy, I want him to be whole.

My love means I have to let him go.

When he moves his lips away, pushes the tip of his nose along my cheek, I’m crying, messy and wet, and he says, “Caroline. God, Caroline. Don’t.”

“It’s okay,” I say. “It’s just the way it is.”

His hands. His hands are on my shoulders, my neck, his thumbs smoothing over my mouth, and I’m stroking his forearms, the muscles firm and tight, following the grooves, ruffling his arm hair, wishing we had more time.

I don’t think it’s fair that we don’t have more time.

There isn’t anyone to complain to.

My fingers catch on the leather bracelet at his wrist, the letters of his name. I find the snap and work my thumb beneath it, flicking it off. The cuff falls to the floor, and when I reach to pick it up, our heads knock together, because he bent down to get it for me. Just one more thing he would do for me if he could. One more way he wants to help me with the work of being alive.

“I need to keep it.”

He smiles and says, “Okay.”

He puts it on my wrist, and then he kisses my arm, right by the snap, right over my pulse.

There are flags inside me, too, with his prayers on them. I’ll carry him everywhere, for the rest of my days.

“Take care of yourself,” he says. “Don’t let anybody get away with any bullshit.”

“I won’t.”

“Bridget and Quinn will look out for you. And try to keep Krish from self-destructing, if you can.”

Krishna.

Krishna is a mess.

He let West take the fall for him, walked out of jail and straight into a bar. He hasn’t come back to the apartment, and he won’t answer West’s calls.

Only Bridget seems to know what he’s up to. She’s talked to him a few times. She’s worried about him, but none of us knows what to do.

I can’t really concentrate on Krishna right now.

“I’ll do my best.”

My voice is full of tears. My heart is so full of cuts, nicks—every second this goes on makes the blood flow more freely. Cleans me out. Empties me.

He rests his head against my neck, kisses me at the nook where neck becomes shoulder. “Don’t cry because of me. You’re going to be fine. Great. Better than great. You’ll get a whole lot more sleep, too, which is good. You’ll live longer.”

Come back to me.

The words are shouting inside me, bouncing around like manic ghosts, but I clamp my mouth shut and rest my hands on his body, just to feel his warmth and the way his back rises and falls with every breath. The ridges of his spine.

I don’t know if I’ll ever see him again.

“Promise me,” I say, even though I wasn’t going to. Even though I swore to myself I wouldn’t make a single demand. “Promise me you’ll be my friend. Promise me you’ll call me, text me, tell me what’s going on with you. Promise if you’re awake in the middle of the night, if you’re alone, if you need somebody—”

He lifts his head and wipes my tears away again, this time with his thumbs. “I promise.”

“You’re going to need a friend.”

“Yeah.”

“I want to be your friend, West.”

He kisses the tip of my nose. “You’re already my friend, Caroline Piasecki.”

I just close my eyes. I close my eyes and open my hands and let go of the tail of his shirt. “You should get in line.”

“Yeah.”

“Text me when you land.”

“I will.”

“Tell your sister I said hi.”

“She’ll like that.”

This time, when he kisses me, I don’t let myself touch him. Not anywhere but at the mouth.

His lips are so soft.

They tell me all the things I told him and more.

Live. Breathe. Fight.

Be who you are. Be better.

Be fierce.

“Don’t wait for me,” he whispers, and he kisses me again. “I don’t want you to wait.”

When he picks up his backpack and walks away, I think of the day we met.

How he drove his car almost right into my feet. How he teased me, made me smile, made me faint.

How he looked with that dumb rubber chicken dangling from his fingers, grinning, asking me, Want to play?

I think maybe I’ve always been waiting for him.

Always.

I don’t know how I’m ever going to be able to stop.

The thing about being a good girl is, you spend your whole life developing a finely honed radar for detecting anything that could potentially cause people to love you less.

Girls like the one I was last August—we eat approval. We live for it.

So when we’re attacked viciously by a guy who goes out of his way to make us feel dirty and disgusting, our first reaction is always to take all the blame on ourselves.

My fault, we say. My fault, my fault, my fault.

It takes a special kind of person to pull our hands off our eyes and show us what it is we’re really looking at. Whose fault it is. What a useless exercise blame can be.

West taught me to make bread. He hoisted me up on a roof and kissed me until I saw stars.

He taught me that deeper is worth going after.

Because one text message can crack the solid ground of your life wide open. One bad decision, one flash of the camera, and the sunny, perfect part of your youth is over.

Then you get to decide. You look around, sift through the rubble, make your choices.

You arm yourself with love, friends, knowledge.

You figure out who you are. What you want.

You figure it out, and you go after it with everything you’ve got.

And that means sometimes you have to let yourself be scared. You have to turn left and take risks and make mistakes, because, otherwise, how do you find friends who will teach you how to tackle, to drink butterscotch schnapps for no reason at all, to strip down to your bra and dance?

When you’ve got a shot at deeper, you have to fist your hands in its T-shirt and pull it closer. Tug until fabric rips. Yank at it, reel it in until it’s naked up against your belly and you’re starving and full, desperate and satiated, dizzy and grounded.

You have to, because ugliness is everywhere.

Because life’s not fair.

Because the world is a seriously fucked-up place.

You have to, because beauty is out there, and it’s worth every sacrifice we make to seize it.

It’s worth it even if we don’t get to keep it.

Dear readers,

What happened to Caroline is called “revenge porn” or “nonconsensual pornography,” and it sucks. It’s also perfectly legal everywhere in the United States with the exception of New Jersey.