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Alexandra Seiler

before

She will not know, when he steps onto her shores for the
first time, that he will not stay. But it will not take her long to
realize, when she kisses him and sees the reflections of some
foreign horizon in his eyes. He has big dreams. He is a college
senior, graduating in a year. He’s got a job, or a spot in
graduate school, or a gap year of travel, waiting for him in his
future. She is an underclassman, stuck in the oldest brick
dorm buildings for another three years. She will know, then,
that he is leaving, the first time he speaks of his plans, the
Ithaca awaiting across the sea. But she will not let herself face
it until he takes a walk with her around the woods attached to
campus in the dark, holding her hand, and he tells her that
this is only temporary. Only until he can set sail again.

“That’s fine,” she will say, even though it is not. “That’s
perfectly fine.”

She will know that she is not supposed to love him, and it
will not matter; she will do it anyway. She will slip into loving
him like she has been meant to do it all along.

The year will be her island. There will be joy that takes the
breath from her lungs. Later, she will try to conjure up
specifics, and some moments will float to mind. She will recall
pecking him on the lips at the base of the stairway in the
humanities building the day before winter break. She will
remember their first kiss, on the grass outside, where anyone
could see (but nobody did). She will think of the line of his jaw
in the low light of his bedroom, of his sleepy half-smile in the
mornings, of the way she traced the bow of his lips with her
fingertips, the way his hair fell over his eyes as he bent his
neck to kiss her. But they will blend together into a haze of
color and light and happiness, and she will remember not the

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