No1: YOU’RE NOT GOING TO SAVE HIM

PHOTO BY LUCIA AUERBACH

REBECCA KOPELMAN

You keep a fake ID, a love note, and a stack of curdled photos from the summer in your nightstand. The note is crude and gentle and brutish, like the boy who wrote it, and the ID is from Rhode Island. In the photos, the boy’s eyes are half shut, glimmering in the pale sun. You don’t love him anymore, you’ve decided. You love somebody new, now. 

Now, you go to Riverside Park instead of Central, and you microdose on a Monday with your New Boy, whose love is shaped differently. He speaks in riddles, and laughs at your gracelessness. He’s still in love with somebody–she lies between your soft bodies while you hold each other on his unmade bed. Her presence makes you ache, and New Boy cries into your shoulder.

Your Old Boy has a new girl now, and you wonder if he calls her the names he saved for you, whether he’s said i love you yet. But now, you look up at the gray sky, which tingles with your aloneness, and he becomes an abstract. Summer incarnate, with strong arms and somber eyes. You want to hate him, but he’s melted into an idea, now.

Mostly, you just miss the warm gun that was perpetually pressed to your lovestruck temple when you were together. Its weight would be gone soon, you knew, but still you leaned into the barrel, came to love it like it could love you back. It’s different, with the New Boy; colder. He wears a silver ring on his slender trigger finger, and there’s no expectation of forever. 

You’re one of many beautiful flings, your New Boy says, but I won’t forget you. 

New Boy thinks you were lovers in a past life. He thinks you were a warrior king. You think he’s full of shit, but bask in his lilting voice anyway. He’s beautiful, and he tells you he loves you on the train and in the park, kissing your forehead while you fall hopelessly into him Sometimes, he reaches around you to light a cigarette, and the flame nearly burns the tip of your nose. 

He’s not forever: you can see it when he snorts white powder off a dirty key and tells you how he used to be a sex addict. Forever is stillness, and he always needs to be moving. Soon he’ll find a new girl to call otherworldly and tell poetic lies.

Even so, you wish you could be the only one. You wish your Old Boy could have been yours. You wish you could have made a home inside of that one blissful August. 

But now it’s September, and summer is gone, and you should really throw those old photos away.