Things You Will Never Get Back: Part Three
By Molly Labell
The way you loved your sister when you were fourteen and she was seventeen. You will never meet anyone who smelled like her, talked like her, drove like her, or breathed like her. You will never love anyone as belligerently as you loved your seventeen year old sister.
The forty minutes you sat in complete silence with your high school boyfriend on some steps at the reception for his father’s funeral, with his hand holding yours so tightly that his mom will say later that it looked like he was holding onto you for dear life.
The eighth grade, when you’d walk home from school every day, and then make a giant bowl of ramen and watch Roseanne on TBS. You were a latchkey kid and your sister wasn’t around much, and you’d have the whole house to yourself and you were so. fucking. depressed that that was all you wanted.
That time the guy you slept with all through your senior year of college spent the night, and it was May but already so hot and humid and you both woke up around 6 in the morning, drenched in sweat. You went to the kitchen of your dorm and filled up a thermos with ice water, and the two of you sat naked in the middle of your floor drinking it and not saying a word.
Smoking weed in your backyard during high school with your two best friends and laughing harder than you’ve ever laughed in your entire life.
The last two weeks or so of college, when you pulled a series of all-nighters. You’d keep the coffee shop where you were a barista open all night with one or two friends. No matter who was with you, they’d eventually fall asleep but you’d stay up the whole time. Every half hour you’d go out onto the porch with a mug of tea and smoke a cigarette and notice how much lighter the sky was getting.
Sitting with your best friend in the fine arts building of your college, watching your other best friend play the piano.
The day your sophomore year of college when they found the freshman boy who had been missing for three days in a pond on campus. You walked to the campus center to buy an iced coffee and hysterically sobbed the entire way and saw two other people doing the same thing.
That three month period in high school when you started working at Planned Parenthood and read The Bluest Eye and saw The Accused. It all just clicked and you finally put a word—feminist—to what you had a feeling you had been all along.
The June and July after you graduated from college when you literally drank over a gallon of water a day and ate almost nothing besides peaches and avocados.
Losing your virginity when you were eighteen at His house, and going downstairs to hang out with your friends immediately after and having almost ten minutes pass before you realize there is blood caked all over your hands.
The day your father had surgery for prostate cancer. You were such a wreck that you ate an entire box of Nutter Butters and had the runs for three days.
Being nine and sitting at the top of the stairs while your mom and her friend Elise sat in your living room, playing their acoustic guitars and singing “Suzanne” and “Fire and Rain.”