I’m curled up in the corner of the soft brown leather couch in the kitchen, only I think it’s a new couch. That dishwasher isn’t the same dishwasher we once filled with liquid dish detergent and flooded the kitchen. This rug doesn’t have the faint brown stain from the coke I kicked over or the red speckles from the plate of spaghetti Mac knocked out of Sarah’s hand. I think the walls are a different color too.

The same people surround me, my closest friends are tucked into couches or perched on counter tops around the room while we wait for Sarah to finish getting dressed. If I try hard enough,  I can still see us all crowded around the dinner table together laughing with the Burns’ family, or I can see us dancing around Sarah’s dad as he cooked while we belted out an out-of-tune rendition of Joe Cocker’s “With a Little Help From My Friends.” It was Poppa Burns’ favorite song.

We looked different then, in my memories. Younger, sillier, wilder. Not all dressed in black like we are today.

Sarah comes down the stairs in a pressed black dress, her wavy blonde hair pulled into a crisp ponytail at the back of her head. We all turn to look at her and smile, but none of us move. The normal warmth and happiness that usually fills this house is gone. It feels too quiet. Too still. Too empty.

Because one of us is missing.

At the Burns’ house, everyone is family. You could stay for an afternoon or for a week. On a few occasions, I was known to move in for several. Everyone was always invited to dinner, even if their daughters — our friends — weren’t there. They came to all of our games, even for the sports Sarah didn’t play. They wrote us letters when we left for college. They told us we were always welcome there. And we were.

We always came back. For dinners, for holidays, for Joe Cocker songs in the kitchen. And now, for a funeral.

“We all ready?” Sarah asks and we all get up, sliding on our shoes and smoothing out our black dresses. “Mom’s in the car. She says we shouldn’t keep Dad waiting.”

There are no words to tell your friend when her father dies. So well all just stand there side by side next to Sarah as she looks at Pat.

“A million things that could be running through my mind right now,” Sarah whispers, “but all that is there is that stupid Joe Cocker song. I can’t get it out of my head.” We all chuckle. Because we were singing it too. It was his favorite.

At the Burns’ house, everyone is family. You could stay for an afternoon or for a week. Everyone was always invited to dinner. We didn’t pray before we ate. Instead, before each meal, Pat Burns would raise his glass and toast: “Here’s to all the places we’ve gone, and all the places we’ll go.”

So this is for you, Pat — one more song because it was your favorite. Here’s to all the places you went, the people you touched, and the places we’ll all go.

Patrick James Burns

“Oh how I love this time of day,” I declare to the boy sitting next to me and take a long slurp of my strawberry and peach smoothie.

“How come?” Walter asks. We’re sitting on the trunk of my car outside the laundromat, tightly bundled in our warmest winter coats guarding ourselves from the below-freezing temperatures while our clothes tumble around the warm dryer inside. “It’s cold.”

“Yes, it is cold,” I concede, but turn and smile at him. “But only on those really cold winter nights does the sky get clear enough to see all of the colors of the sunset.”

Walter eyes me skeptically and looks at the city skyline in the distance with buildings whose office windows are still glowing despite the growing late hour.

“See there,” I point toward the horizon, “it’s still bright yellow and orange there, but as we look up it gets darker and darker until right above us we can see the stars.”

Walter follows my hand as I point out the night’s pallet to him, but his nose still scrunches up in skepticism when he returns his gaze to mine.

“I guess.”

I just laugh at him and shove him gently in the shoulder. “I love how skeptical you are,” I tell him. “That means you’re smart.”

I take another long drink of my smoothie and let out a satisfied moan. “Oh man, I love smoothies.”

“You sure do love a lot of things,” Walter says.

“I guess I do. You find that strange?”

He just shrugs at me.

“What do you love?” I ask.

“Harry Potter,” he answers instantly and we both laugh and I nod my head in agreement. “And my mom and I guess my sisters. And my Transformers. And Katie.”

“Who’s Katie?”

“Just a girl at school.”

“Oh?”

“I don’t know if I love her or not. I think I do.” I only hum and take another drink of my smoothie. “How am I supposed to know if I love her? I don’t even know what love is.”

“Love is a lot of things,” I tell him and smile.

“Does it make me a wimp if I love her? My friend Frankie says love is for pussies.”

“Whoa, watch that vocabulary kiddo,” I say barely containing my laughter. “And you tell Frankie he’s the pussy.” And I wink at him. “We lose ourselves in the things we love, but we find ourselves there too.”

Walter is wise beyond his years and he nods at me as if my explanation makes perfect sense, though I’m not sure even I understand the depths of what I’m trying to say.

“She’s extraordinary,” he says and one of those face-splitting smiles breaks out across his face and his innocent happiness is irresistibly contagious. “She makes everything extraordinary.”

“Sounds like love to me,” I say and rock my body towards his to bump his shoulder with mine.

I think about Walter’s question the whole way home. What is love?

Oh, love is so many little things. Talking in the dark, waiting for the phone to ring, inside jokes and laughter. It’s sharing fries and milkshakes. It’s giving balloons instead of flowers because they inexplicably make you smile. It’s holding hands in the car, it’s singing along to the radio, it’s camping in the rain, it’s standing on the top of a mountain with the wind in your hair. It’s giving you my tomatoes and taking your mushrooms. It’s the fighting and making up again. It’s that first drowsy thought in the morning and that last kiss at night. It’s always being there, no matter what.

And somewhere between all of the laughs, long talks, longer drives, stupid fights and all of the jokes, love just falls into place.

Walter thinks Katie is extraordinary. Walter doesn’t realize how extraordinary he is. We too often see love as an impossibly complicated thing. But it isn’t. Love is simple. It is so simple that you can see it in someone’s face, you can see it in things they do every day without them uttering a single word.

We sat around a fire built on the rough sandy beaches of the North Sea, warming our bodies against the cold evening. July could no more battle the British ocean’s crisp breezes than we could fight off my impending departure.

“It’s only an ocean,” I told my best friend and she nodded, but continued to cry.

“I know I’m being ridiculous. I know I shouldn’t be homesick already. But —”

“It’s only an ocean,” I said again and closely watched her damp face shine in the glow of the fire for any sign that she actually believed me. When she finally looked up and smiled at me, I let myself believe I was right.

****

“I recognize that song. What is it?” I ask her and she smiles while she looks up at at the lights of the Christmas tree and her low humming turns into soft familiar verses.

“Seems like old times, dinner dates and flowers ...” she sings and I can’t help but smile.

“Just like old times, staying up for hours …” I whisper the next line back to her.

“I don’t want to have to choose,” I tell her and wet tears that I’ve been holding back all day leak from the corners of my eyes and sink into my hair. Laying on my back under the Christmas tree, I look up at the twinkling lights and pretend that it is 12 years ago, that my best friend and I are young and inexperienced and immature and still have a a whole world of possibilities at our feet. I pretend it’s just the two of us — like it was back then when no force was strong enough to come between best friends.

“I won’t make you,” she says and for a half of a second I let myself believe that this must mean everything will be OK. But I’m just pretending. I’m letting myself live in a time that no longer exists. We’ve long ago left that pair of 13-year-old girls who used to lay under the Christmas tree and share our dreams, convinced we’d reach them together. We never allowed ourselves to consider what the adult world might change. Or that there would be a million things separating us.

“It’s only an ocean,” she says and I roll my head to the side to meet her eyes that are swimming in fear. “You told me that when I moved to England. You said it again last year when I couldn’t come home for Christmas.”

I remember.

“You told me it was OK. That things would never change and that it was just a teeny tiny ocean. Nothing more.”

“I lied,” I say. “It’a  big freaking ocean.” Neither of us are talking about the Atlantic.

“I won’t make you choose,” she says again, but the way her voice trembles and the tears that fall from her eyes tell me she knows I’ll have to choose anyway.

He will make me.

“We had things all worked out back then,” Mac says and I know she’s missing the 13-year-old friends too. “We were always going to be best friends. And our husbands were going to be best friends and our kids were going to be best friends.”

I can only nod as I clench my jaw together to keep in the sobs.

“Tell me it’s only an ocean,” she begs and her hand is trembling when she grasps mine. “Please.”

“It’s only an ocean,” I choke out and grip her hand. “But we both know that ocean has nothing to do with this.”

“He won’t make you choose,” she whispers. “He wouldn’t make you do that.”

But we both know she isn’t right. He already has.

My tears fall quietly as I listen to my best friend as she continues to whisper the lyrics of the song we used to sing to each other while dancing around my grandmother’s house to her old record player. “Making dreams come true, doing things we used to do … “

Maybe it was very long ago.

“Seems like old times, being here with you.“

Before I even know I’ve fallen asleep, I wake up still under the long branches of the pine tree. But I’m alone. The smell of breakfast wafts in from the kitchen and when I roll over to stand up my hand crunches down on a wrinkled piece of paper with Mac’s familiar handwriting scrawled across it.

I wish it was only an ocean.

My mother says I am the queen of fixing things. If there is a problem, I find a solution. Quick. Right now. Before anything else can go wrong.

According to history, this need to fix mainly manifests itself in the living and breathing broken — a baby bird pushed out of its nest, a rabbit with a broken foot, a little brother, a best friend, a young love.

She says I was always dragging them home with me to make a stint out of chopsticks or a cast of construction paper and tape. I fixed the bruises left by school bullies with board games and cartoons. I mended broken hearts and teenage girl drama with chocolate chip cookies, fashion magazines and Johnny Depp movies.

But I always fell in love with my wounded, and I could never bring myself to let them go again. The problem was, the more I loved my wounded, the stronger they became. Until soon they were strong enough to run away, to fly to the top of a tree, or simply to out grow their need for me.

Today, I got an invitation in the mail.

A light cream, linen-blend envelope. Printed with slanted, slightly overly-spaced calligraphy done with a shaky hand who’d watched a YouTube video on how to form the elegant script just for this occasion. Special stamps because even traditional postage won’t do today.

It’s a wedding invitation. “Come share in the joy of the truest of loves,” it begins in its elegantly embossed black script.

The RSVP card gives two options:

• I wouldn’t miss it
• I wish I could be there, but I’ll celebrate from afar

That’s all I have to choose from? I have to pick one of those two boxes to package up all of the emotions that course through me when I slide this invitation out of its fancy envelope?

I never was any good at multiple choice.

My very first boyfriend — very first love, I’m assuming that’s what that horrific burning feeling was — is getting married. And I’m invited. And I have two boxes to choose from staring back at me from a fancy piece of paper. With fancy writing and riddled words.

And somewhere in my clouded mind that can’t seem to stop staring at this damn piece of paper, I’m secretly somewhat shocked. All this time, he’s existed without me, and it’s strange, faced with this reality. People don’t just freeze in time when they exit your life. They continue on. They grown and change. They live. With other people.

My mind has wandered back to my older brother’s wedding with my 18-year-old date dressed in a crisp suit that he’s never worn before spinning me around with ungraceful, stumbling steps as we dance on the scuffed parquet wood floor. “You think that will be us one day?” he’d asked me and of course I’d said yes because when you’re 18 and a boy in a suit asks you to dance, you think you’ve found your fairy tale.

How sad it is that our first love and our first heartbreak usually coincide with each other. Young, pure emotions shattered by the realities of life. It isn’t fair that the memories of our first romance are scarred by the pain of its ending. Our first love is supposed to be a monumental movement, a transition of sorts between the innocence of childhood and the demands of being an adult. Instead, it is a cliff’s edge. A plunge into the dark waters from soaring heights and pure adrenaline-fueled elation. It’s what makes the slap of the freezing cold water so harsh — that you see it coming, racing at you with no means of escape … but you do nothing to stop it.

My eyes refocus on the card and I grab a pen off of my desk. I draw a box of my own — a third option — and then my messy handwriting scrawls my response across the pristine card: I cordially decline, best wishes.

… And love can mend your heart
But only if you’re lucky now.