Just Remember to Breathe (Thompson Sisters)

much I missed Alex. Cyndi was cool about it. She hugged me, and said all the right things, and we parted as friends.
    I didn’t date again for a while. Alex and I talked on the phone almost every day, anyway. We wrote emails to each other, and sent texts constantly, and prodded and poked each other on Facebook. We were four thousand miles away from each other, and I Facebook stalked her, checking out the photos she posted, trying to figure out what her status meant every time it changed.
    Honestly, it was crazy. There I was, a senior in high school. The girl I loved was fully across the country from me. One week we were on, the next we were off. Neither of us could figure out what made the most sense to do. I planned going to visit her in March during spring break, but in early January, business was slow at the restaurant where I waited tables, and they let me go. No money meant no trips all the way across the country. So we missed each other in March, and one night during spring break she called me. Drunk.
    The words that came out of her mouth stunned me. “I wish I could make love to you.”
    It stopped my heart.
    So, I scrounged. I kept looking for a job, but no luck. It was 2009. Jobs waiting tables or washing dishes were going to guys with Masters degrees. An eighteen-year-old high school student didn’t have a chance. I pawned my iPod, my mom and I held a yard sale, and I managed to scrounge up the sum total of one hundred and twenty dollars. And that was enough for a round trip Greyhound ride from Atlanta to San Francisco and back. I left the day after I graduated high school.
    Anyway. Not much point in talking about the visit. It was… poignant… painful… pathetic. We kissed in Golden Gate Park. We made out in a photo booth at the Greyhound station before I left. We fell in love all over again, even though it was impossible. A week after I returned home, we had our first really nasty fight over the phone.
    I did what I sometimes do best. I ran away fast. The morning after our fight, I enlisted in the US Army.
    Is it any wonder that lying here in my bed at Columbia two years later, I wasn’t able to get to sleep?
    Instead of sleeping, I thought of holding her in my arms.
    I thought of the literally hundreds of emails we’d sent back and forth.
    I thought of the hundreds of hours we’d spent on the phone, talking about our lives, our dreams.
    After running with her in the early morning it was hard to forget how much I loved her, and I needed to forget. Because the one thing I couldn’t forget, or forgive for that matter, was the last conversation we had. Kowalski had been killed that morning, and we’d returned to base, shaken, horrified by his death. It was the low point in our deployment for most of us, and certainly for me. I desperately needed to talk. I needed her. Worse than I ever had before. And when I got her on Skype, she was fucking drunk. That much was obvious.
    I tried to tell her what was going on, but she brushed me off. She started telling me it wasn’t working, that we couldn’t be together. And then, I saw the one thing I never expected to see. A guy, walking past her in her room, with his shirt off. As he passed her, his hand briefly touched her shoulder.
    Even thinking about it makes me want to vomit. It makes me want to scream with rage. I’m not over it. I don’t think I’ll ever get over it. And while I can spend all day long thinking about how much I love her, I can’t forget that moment. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t say anything. I reached out and closed the connection. I logged on to Facebook and disabled my profile. I deleted my Skype account. I erased my digital identity. Then I took the laptop and smashed it.
    The next morning we went back out into the field.
    It was weeks before I got a chance to get to my email again. For reasons I’ll never understand, my mother brought me a used laptop when I was at Walter Reed.
    I had about twenty messages from her. For one aching moment, I almost read them. I couldn’t do it. But I couldn’t delete them either. So I stuck them in an archive folder where I wouldn’t have to see them. And I tried to forget.
    Like a lot of other things in my life, I did a pretty crappy job of forgetting.



CHAPTER SIX

    I don't understand either one of you (Alex)

    “Alex, I need your help,” Kelly said the moment I walked into the room.
    “Hey there. What’s up?” I asked, setting my bag down next to the bed. I settled in on the