The Door I Locked

Chapter Two: Deep In

There's a version of that year I could tell you that's just a list of firsts, the way people usually tell these stories. First time he cooked for me and nearly burned down his apartment doing it. First road trip, four hours each way to a beach that turned out to be closed, and neither of us caring because the drive was the point. First fight, over something so small I can't even reconstruct it now, and the terror of it — the real fear, at nineteen, that this was how it ended, before we learned that we were the kind of people who fought and then stayed.

But that's not really what I remember. What I remember is smaller than that. Unspectacular, almost, if you didn't know what it would come to mean.

I remember him falling asleep first, always, no matter what time we started a movie, and how I'd lie there afterward not really watching the screen anymore, just watching the rise and fall of him instead, thinking I had never in my life felt this safe doing nothing.

I remember the four bars of that song. He hummed them grocery shopping, hummed them doing problem sets, hummed them once during his own brother's toast at a family dinner, so quietly only I caught it, and I had to bite my cheek not to laugh at how little he knew himself. I asked him once what the song even was. He said he didn't know — that he wasn't sure he was humming an actual song at all, that maybe he'd just made it up somewhere along the way and it had lodged itself in him like a stone in a shoe. I liked that idea. I liked thinking some part of him existed that even he hadn't fully discovered yet, and that I got to notice it before he did.

I remember the promise, if you can even call something so unceremonious a promise. We were lying on the roof of Julian's dorm building, technically not allowed up there, watching a plane blink its way across the sky, and he said, apropos of nothing, "I'm going to marry you, you know." Not a proposal. Not even really addressed to me, more like a fact he was confirming out loud for his own benefit. I laughed and told him he was being dramatic, that we were twenty, that people who say things like that at twenty usually don't mean forever, they mean right now feels like forever, which is different.

"Maybe," he said. "But I still think it's true."

I didn't answer him. I just took his hand and let the silence be the answer, because some part of me — the part that hadn't yet learned to distrust its own certainty — believed him completely.

I think about that roof more than almost anything else from that year. Not because it was the most romantic moment, though it might have been. I think about it because it was the last stretch of time I can point to and say: that girl up there believed, without a single reservation, that the person beside her would never be the one to hurt her. Every memory after that has some shadow in it, cast backward by what I already know is coming. That one doesn't. That one is just two kids on a roof, certain of something neither of them could actually promise.

Julian's parents started including me in things that weren't really about me — a cousin's graduation, a family friend's funeral, the small unremarkable errands of a life, the way you only fold someone into your family's logistics once you've quietly decided they're staying. My mother started saying "when you two" instead of "if." Small words. I didn't clock, at the time, how much weight they were carrying.

We talked, sometimes, in the lazy unfocused way you talk at that age, about the shape a life might take. Where we'd live. Whether he'd go into his father's business the way everyone assumed, or do something else entirely, something he was cagier about, like he wasn't sure yet if he was allowed to want it. I told him about the company I wanted to build one day, half-joking, the way you make big claims that feel safe precisely because they're so far off. He never laughed at that part. He'd just nod, like it was already decided, like the only question left was the timeline.

"You're going to be terrifying," he told me once, grinning. "Some board meeting somewhere, absolutely destroying people, and I'm going to sit at home telling everyone I knew you before."

I didn't know, hearing that, that he had the order backward. That it would be him at home, and me in the boardroom, and neither of us together to see it happen.

I didn't know a lot of things, that year. I've had a long time since to sit with everything I didn't know.