I tell him I’m so excited for him, and Gray turns to look at me and he broadens his shoulders and raises his chin.
“I want you to come with me,” he says. It’s not a question; it’s a statement, as if he has no doubt I’ll say yes. But instead of leaping at the offer, my body wants to sink. I have to make an effort to hold myself up.
I want to look away, but his eyes are fixed stubbornly on mine. This is it. We can’t tiptoe around the issue. We can’t make light of it anymore. There isn’t time. I’m leaving in two days.
I don’t answer him; I just keep walking. Stalling. I can sense him starting to panic. Silence, for me, is usually a bad sign.
“This isn’t a spontaneous idea,” he says. “I’ve thought about it every day since Coach Clark made me the offer.”
Gray maps out our future together. He tells me I can move with him next month, find a part-time job, work on my photography, maybe take a few classes.
I’m quiet and Gray thinks I’m considering the offer. He promises I’ll love Albuquerque. It’s in a canyon and it’s surrounded with stacks of red rocks, deserts, and mountains. It’s a photographer’s paradise. There are hiking trails everywhere.
“We can discover it together,” he says. I smile at him, but it’s forced. I feel it stop short of my eyes.
“We could get a puppy,” he says, just to entice me. He lists breeds. A Great Dane, a Weimaraner, a chocolate Lab, one of those goldendoodle things, he doesn’t care. His words make tears splinter the back of my eyes. The more he talks, the harder my chest aches, because I know I have to let him down.
“We could adopt Boba,” he says. “The world’s smelliest mammal. It would be my housewarming gift,” he offers. “Best of all,” he reminds me, “I’ll be there.”
For the first time in my life, I’m speechless. He’s offering me his future. But that’s the problem. It’s his life, it isn’t mine. I could never follow someone else’s path. Can’t he see that? Doesn’t he understand? I’ve been waiting seventeen years to finally strike out on my own.
When there’s more silence, Gray keeps rambling, because he’d rather talk than hear an answer he can’t accept. He lists the reasons why he wants me there, needs me there. He lists off the fun things we can do.
“Think of all the road trips we can take,” he says. “Utah, the Grand Canyon, Colorado, Vegas . . .”
He tells me we can get married. I stop walking and stare at him.
“You’re joking.”
“I’m serious,” he demands. “I love you. Don’t you get it? You’re the one. We’re meant for each other. I could spend every day with you. I could build that house we designed on Camelback. Well, if I was a millionaire,” he adds.
I can barely swallow.
He tells me this is it. It’s what people wait their entire lives to find and we’re lucky enough to experience it. He tells me he doesn’t want to pass this up just because of bad timing. He says we can make our own timing. We can be in charge of time.
“Gray—”
“If you want to marry me, I’ll ask you right now. Or, we can look at rings first, whatever you want.”
“Are you seriously proposing to me?” I ask. Please say no. For the love of God and sanity and my emotional well-being, please say no.
He holds his head up high and tells me, yes, he is. He fixes his eyes intensely on mine.
“Dylan, will you marry me?” he asks.
I can only stare at him. My legs are frozen with shock. Boba yanks on the leash and nearly pulls my arm out of its socket. He starts dragging me down the sidewalk like he’s humiliated for Gray. I’m surprised that instead of feeling happy or amazed or even panicked, more than anything, I’m angry. Furious.
“You’re being ridiculous,” I say. I tell him he’s scared for all the changes that are about to happen and he’s grasping for something constant to hold on to.
He argues it isn’t true. He tells me he loves me and I’m the most important thing in the world to him. His voice cracks.
“I don’t want to lose you,” he says.
I stop because I finally know what I need to say.
“Gray, I’m not yours to lose.”
Gray
I watch her as the words slowly sink in.
Her eyes are sad and serious, brimming with tears, eyes I have never seen until this moment. It’s breathtaking to see pain behind them. She always saved her sadness. She kept it in. She let me be sad this summer; she let me be angry and hurt and lonely and depressed. Her eyes silence me. Nothing is more distressing than a sad angel. I know what her answer is.
“You’re not even going to think about it?” I ask. I’m not desperate, I want to add. I’m not trying to hold on to Dylan just because I can’t live without her. All I know is, I’m convinced I want her more than anything. So, my reasoning is simple. It makes perfect sense for her to join me.
“Of course I’ve thought about it,” she says. “And it probably all sounds perfect to you. But I need to get to know myself first, Gray. I need to be complete with who I am before I try to be there for someone else.”
I feel like the sky’s falling down around me. My forehead creases with confusion. “So I’m not enough?” I argue.
This question makes the tears stream down her face.
She tells me she wants to travel. She wants to see the world. She tells me she just broke the surface this summer. She came down here to start her journey, and this is just the beginning. She says she didn’t come down here to fall in love.
“But you did,” I remind her, and she winces as if my words hurt. Sometimes the simplest words cut the deepest if they’re aimed right.
“I love you,” she says. “But that doesn’t mean I’m ready to give up my life for you. I don’t want to pull over and park right now. I want to see places, Gray. I want to live my life. You’re asking me to give up who I am. If I move with you, I’ll just be living your life. Your dream. I’ll regret the things you’re going to hold me back from doing, and then I’ll probably blame you. And that’s not fair to either of us.”
My brain twists with anger to hear the truth. I have to make an effort to breathe. I try to make sense of her logic. And sadly, right now she’s the logical one. I’m crazy. Crazy for her.
“Where are you going to go?” I ask.
She tells me after her cousin’s wedding she’s heading out west. She wants to spend some time in California.
“I had a phone interview with a coffee shop in Shasta City,” she says. “They offered me the job. They said I can start next month.”
She has the nerve to smile, and it only fuels my anger.
“When did you decide all this?” I demand to know.
“I’ve known for a few days,” she says. “I started looking after you told me you accepted the offer from New Mexico.”
She keeps walking. She tells me she wants to live on the side of a mountain. Then she wants to live on the coast. Someday she wants to live in a huge city where she can ride a train to work and live in a studio downtown with creaky hardwood floors and old, drafty windows. She wants to learn Spanish and travel in Central America. She wants to get out of the States and spend a summer in Italy. She wants to backpack up the east coast of Australia. She isn’t ready to give up her future.
My heart sinks, and my shoulders sink, and my head and my neck and my life. Of course this is what she needs to do. Why did I have to fall in love with a girl as easy to tag down as the wind? I can’t ask her to sit around a college town for me. She would hate it. And she’s right. She would resent me for crippling her dreams.
Tears well up in my eyes, and I quickly blink them away.
We continue down the path and Boba pants between us. I’m walking but I feel like I’m wading through water. Every step takes effort. We’re both silent. What do you say when you’re not enough to make someone stay? What do you do when you meet the love of your life and realize it’s all about timing? How do you accept that no matter how perfect you ar
e for each other, circumstances get in the way? How do you compete with that kind of fate?
First Believe
Dylan
I left this morning.
Last night Gray stayed up making me a going-away present. Ten mixes. He admitted it was a little extreme. He made two or three, then figured he might as well round it off with five. He told me that after he burned five CDs, he realized he didn’t make me anything with rap. I couldn’t be deprived of at least one hip-hop CD. So, one led to a few more. He realized he didn’t burn any Led Zeppelin, any Lenny Kravitz. Not one Jimi Hendrix song. Then, he almost forgot to make me the Ultimate Road Trip Mix. How can I possibly drive without Tom Petty, the Eagles, Bruce Spring- steen, and John Mellencamp? What kind of rustic road trip scenery can go unaccompanied by these voices leading me along, without “American Girl,” “Easy Feeling,” “Born to Run,” and “Jack and Diane”? It’s like watching a movie with no soundtrack, he said.
All of the CDs were labeled using our summer memories: Running down Mulholland, Santa Monica, and Camelback Mountain. One mix was titled Walking with Boba (obviously featuring slower songs). Gray informed me the most difficult and crucial element to making a mix is to choose its title, since it sets the mood for the entire compilation.
The last mix he made has the word love in every song. It’s my favorite one.
I gave Gray a scrapbook to give to his dad. It’s a coffee table book of collected photography. It captures our entire summer together. It’s frozen memories: shots of our hikes around Phoenix, pictures of cactuses, shots of motorcycles parked along the curb of Mill Avenue, their chrome chests jutting in the sun, shots of Sedona, even a few of Los Angeles. I included the photograph of the two geckos talking in the sun. I love that picture. It’s the day we met. Strange to think that two geckos brought us together.
I made Gray a gift, something thin and rectangular that I wrapped in newspaper. I told him to open it after I left. He gave me a CD case to strap on my visor with the ten mixes inside. He said he hoped Pickle would make it for two thousand miles of freeway driving. He told me to stay in the right lane unless I wanted to instigate road rage. Good advice.
We said goodbye in the morning, early, when the sun was still low in a mauve-colored sky. The air was unseasonably cool. He wore a jacket. It was the first time I’d ever seen Gray in a coat. It already made him feel distant. We both hate goodbyes, so we made it quick, like ripping off a sticky bandage or pulling a sliver from our skin.
He wrapped his arms around me and held me so close our ribs were connecting. He kept breathing me in. I could feel my heart rise and sink, rise and sink with every breath.
I couldn’t stop the tears spilling from my eyes. He swept them away with his fingers. I knew saying goodbye would be hard, but I never knew it could physically hurt, as though a rope were strangling my heart.
I told Gray I loved him over and over. He told me he loved me. He said I changed his life. I couldn’t put into words how much he changed mine. But then he said something that wasn’t fair. He said if I really loved him, I wouldn’t leave him.
“You’re leaving too,” I reminded him. I said we both needed to leave in order to live.
“I want to see you again” is all he said.
I promised him he would.
He told me he loved me again. He’s like one of those cactuses we saw hiking this summer. His center is finally exposed.
I told Gray to keep on loving. To love as many people as he could. I promised it would come back to him if he did. He shook his head. He told me he could only love me, and it scared me because I knew he meant it.
“I’m not your only love, Gray,” I insisted. “I’m just your first love.”
Gray
I’m sitting in my room staring at cardboard boxes stuffed with things I don’t want. Crap I don’t need. All I want is you. U2 nailed it.
I can still see Dylan’s car driving away, the rusty orange station wagon growing tinier in the distance like a fading sunset. I can still feel her tears on my fingers. They were hot to my touch, like desert rain.
This fucking hurts. Why does loving someone have to fucking hurt?
I don’t know when I’ll see Dylan again. She doesn’t use any online networks. She doesn’t have a profile. She’s the only person I’ve ever met my age that doesn’t own a cell phone. Things with wires, with signals, with connections, don’t fit her. Anything that has a definite place, with an end and a beginning, doesn’t suit her. She can’t be tied down. It’s cruel that what I love most about Dylan is the very reason why I can’t have her.
I stare down at the photography book she made for my dad, just like she said she would. Dylan always follows through with what she says. It’s a little scary sometimes. I know he’ll think it’s bizarre that a girl he’s never met is giving him a glimpse of the world through her eyes. But what can I say? That’s just Dylan.
I pick up the gift she gave me and tear through the wrapping. Inside is a framed poem. The memory of the title makes me smile.
“Ode to the Mighty Green Ones.”
The poem we wrote together when we first met. On the side of the poem is a photograph taped to the paper, from our hiking trip. It’s a single, saguaro cactus standing proud in the desert sun. Its arms are stretched out like it’s embracing the air and trying to touch the sky. I read the words and even though I wrote half of the poem, every sentence reminds me of her:
My Phoenix cactus
My tall saguaro tower
Strong and independent
Silent and wise
You live to be two hundred
But you are too prickly
If I fell on you
My body would be contaminated
With needle-point stab wounds
As if a crazy old woman
Tried to kill me by using
Her sewing needles
But I admire your arms
Stretched out in the wind
On more arms stretched out
On more arms stretched out
On more
And I love arms
But yours are too prickly
Because if you hugged me
I’d die in your embrace
Literally
I will always adore you
From a distance
And want to water you
But you don’t need me
Is that why I’m fond of you?
She’s gone.
And it feels like my heart is drained of something solid. Empty. But, she was right. She never belonged to me. Now one thought gives me hope.
I told her I wanted to see her again. And she promised me I would.
First Grow
One Month Later
Gray
Hey, God, did I do something to piss you off? Because I’m starting to think you enjoy twisting the knife in my heart every chance you get. If too much happiness dares to encroach on my life, does some siren go off up there? Uh-oh, Gray’s too happy right now. We can’t have that. Time to shit all over his life again.
Apparently I’m not cut out for happiness. Not my destiny, I guess.
Those were the majority of my thoughts as I drove east to New Mexico. The rest of the time I tried to block out my mind with Rage Against the Machine and Ludacris and Limp Bizkit—people that share my current hostility toward life, and beats that are loud enough to keep me awake during the dozing-off points on boring stretches of highway.
I filled up my hatchback with the most crucial essentials: baseball glove, stereo, music, guitar, and computer. I packed a few bags of clothes. I thought about stealing Dylan’s photography book from my dad and bringing it with me. Not because I want vivid memories of every moment we had together so I can torture myself with daily reminders. But it has a picture of her inside, the only one I have access to. It’s a picture I took in Phoenix: She’s standing in between Boba and this iron statue of a man pointing, and she’s pretending to be the person he’s pointing at. She’s trying to
be funny, but she looks gorgeous with the sun hitting her hair so it’s shining, and it captures her wide smile and her slender body from head to toe.
I moved into a four-bedroom house on campus, a ten-minute walk from the Tow Diem Facility, where the baseball team weight trains. It’s also close to Lobo Field, our main practice field. We play our season games at the Isotopes Park, a stadium that UNM shares with a triple-A baseball league in Albuquerque.
My three roommates, Miles, Todd, and Mark (Mark’s nickname is Bubba), are all baseball players. Todd and Bubba have girlfriends, who are always over, pestering them to do things or hang out or study, and the guys act like they can’t be bothered. Miles desperately wants a girlfriend and he’s the one who’s single. It always seems to work that way.
I just like living with people who move and talk and make noise. It’s a nice change.
My room’s tucked up on the third floor and has white walls that smell freshly painted, and it’s furnished but in an old-school way, as if the person before me had a thing for antiques. I don’t really care. It’s a fresh start with no memories attached, and that’s all I need. I have a full-size bed and a wood desk that’s barely big enough for my legs to fit underneath. There’s a dresser in the corner of the room with a mirror over it, which I take down and replace with a Bob Dylan concert poster Amanda bought me. I stuff Dylan’s framed poem in the bottom drawer of my nightstand. I set my guitar case against the wall next to the door. It only takes an hour to unpack my life.
My favorite part of my room is a door leading out to a fire escape. Whoever designed it figured there might as well be a sitting area in case you need to catch your breath while you’re dodging a burning building. So I’ve inherited a private balcony that faces southwest over rooftops sprawled out below. It’s an oasis from the rest of the world. It’s a place I can just be alone, which I need more than the average person. I crave space. It charges my batteries. It helps me breathe. Being around people can be so exhausting, because most of them love to take and barely know how to give. Except for a rare few.