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grown up on the same street, or had the same seventh-grade
math class, or bought the same thing in the breakfast line
every morning in high school. She would have lived down the
hall from him her first semester at college, or they would have
always been out walking their dogs at the same time, early in
the morning, crossing paths by the oldest bench in the park.
In that life, she would have loved him too. In that life, the love
could have gone either way.

But in this one, when he walks away from her across that
stage, she will not know what to do. They will have promised
each other, in the hazy hours of just before sunrise, that they
will be friends. She will have given him her Skype name,
saved his mailing address into her phone contacts, and
promised to write him letters. She will have asked him, “This
doesn’t mean we aren’t going to talk, right?” and he will have
assured her, “Of course not.” She will have believed him, even
as every fiber of logic in her muscles screamed that she should
not. She will have thought, We can be different. We can make
it. We can at least be friends. She is wrong. It will not be her
fault. She cannot be right, not about this.

She will try. And he will try, but halfheartedly. She will
almost always text first. She will suggest Skype calls, phone
calls, anything to see his face again, to hear the familiar lulls
and cadences of his voice, slipping over words that she knows
she has heard him say before but now seem somehow alien,
filtered through water or warped by a far-off wind. She will
speak to him, sometimes, but it will be rare.

The pace of their conversations will change. There will be
no more rapid-fire banter, over texts or through the airwaves.
The breaks in conversation, when she can hear his voice, will
echo louder than screams. The messages will go unanswered
for hours.

The topics of their conversations will change. They will
speak now of school, and jobs, and every text message will be
prefaced with hey, how are you doing? it’s been a little while.
They will not speak of the past months. She will not speak of

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