Nothing Can Go Wrong
By Michael Koh
We held hands. We held hands walking down the hallway, kissing briefly before we parted to go to class. We joked and laughed at our own jokes after watching terrible horror movies. We cut our fingers and pressed them together. We put our bloody fingers on the living room wall.
We smoked on the bed, on the porch, outside, in the car, on the couch and we somehow always talked about space and what we thought about the future. We took drugs on the couch and didn’t tell anyone else. We drew silly figures on each other’s arms. We hugged a lot and thought we were perfect huggers. We grabbed at each other in the dark in haunted houses. We went to baseball games together. We kissed in subways. We danced at concerts. We danced at skating rinks.
We biked around town. We bought Christmas presents for our friends. We moved in together. We blindfolded each other and tripped on things in our new apartment. We threw water balloons at each other on the sidewalk. We fucked in bathrooms. We fucked in fitting rooms. We took adderall and wrote long silly letters to each other. We put our letters and notes into a time capsule and buried it in Bear Mountain. We went to a Mountain Goats concert. We adopted our first dog and named him Dug after that movie we both cried over. We wrote small notes on post-its and put them on our laptops. We made dinner together. We learned how to swim together. We went to the beach together and lost Dug in the process. We looked for Dug together — we found Dug waiting for us next to our car.
We got stuck outside in a rainstorm. We ate lunch in a small open-air market and got sick. We ate nothing but ramen for a week. We sold books online. We read funny articles to each other. We went to bookstores and pretended we were going to buy books. We shoplifted gum. We always went back and bought something to leave some change behind. We thought we loved Malamud, but really, we were in love with his characters. We painted fire escapes. We took pictures of cracks in sidewalks.
We held hands. We held hands walking down the aisle, kissing briefly after we were wed. We took a trip to Hawaii. We ate fresh coconuts for the first time. We bought shorts and t-shirts and wore them around the hotel room. We tried to surf. We came back to New York. We went barhopping. We took a cab from Brooklyn to Washington Heights and took the subway back to Brooklyn. We looked for the Cash Cab. We took the Staten Island Ferry. We walked on the Williamsburg Bridge and walked to the Brooklyn Bridge. We tried to hitchhike. We were questioned by the police.
We read sappy poetry to each other. We wrote sad poems and submitted them to publishers. We never got published. We sang our own songs and we never wrote them down. We went to Comic-Con. We pretended we were ninjas. We were ghosts for Halloween. We bought too much candy. We wondered if ghosts watched our lives and if we were ghosts to them. We dug up our time capsule and read over our letters. We burned our letters and smiled at each other and screamed at the sun. We held hands and it was to be like this until we drew a breath that was to be our last.