we lunched on the patio, at the high top beside the white lilac bushes, and watched the bumble bees gather nectar. it was a saturday in late july, that part of the year when the sun feels ever-present, always looming over your shoulder, intruding on your conversation, tapping on the kitchen window. we discussed your new life at the bookstore, and i could see—though you could not—the way it fed your spirit.

you didn’t let your sadness show. you hid it away, though i didn’t pry. i didn’t make you dig it out of your bag, shoved alongside your keys and worn copy of clement’s nitrogen fix. i didn’t ask you to roll it out on the table and show me where anxieties had clustered, condensed and formed their gravitational orbits. we pretended as though everything were proceeding to plan, because in a way, it was.

you wouldn’t have seen it, had i pointed it out. you would have bristled to see your own survival, sitting upright at the table, napkin placed deliberately in lap, watching the bumble bees right beside us. a believer in other planets, other worlds, in all the possibilities of the multiverse, you clung tighter to idealized forms of life than i did.

you were to be married just the month prior, at a hotel overlooking mont veyrier in southeastern france. instead, you were moving into a one-bedroom apartment in chicago alone, unable to find your way back to the point of divergence. you could still see the fier river and the festive string lights gripping the colonnades, could smell the ripe berries and tobacco of the chateau lafite, could hear the string quartet playing dvořák. how could something so real never have happened. or worse, you suspected, it did happen—only to a different version of you, a luckier, smarter you. somewhere out there, you were living the life you had dreamed. but this you—there and then—was living the life you’d been given. how to pull you back from other planets, other worlds. how to make you walk the way, to heed the sun.

look, i said, at the bumble bee’s fuzzy legs.