My First Love

Chapter 38: Late April

The end of April had the specific quality of a semester approaching its conclusion.

Not panic — something more like convergence. All the things that had been moving in parallel through the year were beginning to arrive at the same time, the various lines of work and life and relationship reaching their respective endpoints simultaneously.

The Cleary Hill garden site assessment had come back positive.

Prisca's Cleary Hill documentary was in its final edit.

Abdullahi and I were three weeks from submitting the collaborative piece to an undergraduate research journal he had identified.

Peter was revising his paper for submission to the same journal — Abdullahi had suggested it, which Peter had received with the slightly stunned quality that still accompanied Abdullahi's direct endorsements.

The Voss project was ongoing — Jerome, Clara, Thomas, the long year of filming that would continue through summer. But Prisca's role in it had deepened in ways that Voss had begun to formalize.

And somewhere underneath all of it, the paragraph on page thirty-one was growing into something with forty-eight pages and a shape I could almost see.

---

Prisca and I had settled into the version of ourselves that a full year of being together produces.

Not the early version — the careful, deliberate, working-toward-each-other version. Not even the established version of the winter months. Something more inhabited. The specific ease of two people who had been through enough together to have developed a shorthand for everything — the difficult conversations, the good news, the ordinary Tuesday evenings, the moments that mattered and the ones that didn't.

She called me on a Monday afternoon, which was unusual — we texted more than we called.

I answered immediately.

"What's wrong?" I said.

"Nothing's wrong," she said. "Why does something have to be wrong?"

"You're calling on a Monday afternoon."

A pause. "Fair." She paused again. "Voss wants to talk. Tomorrow."

"About what?"

"She didn't say. She said she has a proposal." Another pause. "That word. She used that word specifically."

"A proposal from Rachel Voss is not a thing to be worried about."

"I know," she said. "I'm not worried. I'm—"

"Anticipating."

"Yes." A pause. "The good kind of nervous."

"I know," I said. "Same as before the Brattle."

She was quiet for a moment. "You remember what I said before the Brattle."

"I remember everything," I said. "You know that."

---

The Voss call was Tuesday at seven PM.

I was at my apartment. Prisca was at hers.

She texted at six fifty-eight.

*About to call. Nervous in the good way.*

*You're ready.*

*I know,* she said.

At eight forty-three my phone moved.

*She wants me full time on the Voss project this summer. Paid. Associate producer credit on the finished film.* A pause. *She said the footage I've brought to the Jerome and Clara sessions has changed the character of the project. She said — and these are her exact words — "you see things the camera shouldn't miss and you know how to be present for them."*

I read that twice.

*Prisca.*

*I know.*

*Full time. Associate producer. Credit on the finished film.* I paused. *You're twenty-one years old.*

*I know,* she said again. And then, after a moment: *I'm shaking again.*

*That's allowed,* I wrote back. *You've earned every bit of this.*

A long pause.

Then: *Come over.*

---

I walked to her apartment in the April evening.

She opened the door and I came in and she was standing in the middle of her living room with the open, unguarded expression — the one that was not performing anything, just being exactly what it was.

I crossed the room.

She held on.

For a long time.

No words needed.

---

After a while she stepped back and looked at me.

"Summer in New York," she said. "That's where Voss is based."

"I know."

"That's three months."

"I know that too."

She looked at me carefully. "Are you all right with that?"

I looked at her — Prisca, who had been standing by a window in September thinking about whether she had made the right choice, who had looked across a room and decided yes, who had said *I love you* in the middle of the quad on a January afternoon before it had fully arrived as words.

"Yes," I said. "Completely."

"It's a long time."

"It's three months," I said. "And it's the right thing for you and you know it." I paused. "Are you asking because you're uncertain or because you want to make sure I'm certain?"

She held my gaze.

"The second one," she said quietly.

"Then I'm certain," I said. "Go to New York. Make the film. Come back."

---

She told her mother that evening.

I was still at her apartment when she called — Portland, the warm kitchen, her mother's voice coming through the phone with the brightness Prisca had described once as the sound of someone who had been rooting for her since the beginning.

I heard the brightness even from across the room.

When she hung up she looked at me.

"My mother asked about you," she said.

"What did she tell her?"

"That you told me to go," she said. "Without hesitation."

"It wasn't a difficult thing to tell you."

"She said—" Prisca paused. "She said *that's a man who loves you correctly.*"

I looked at her.

"Correctly," I said.

"Her word." Prisca looked at her hands. "She means — without making it about himself. Without needing you to be smaller so that he can feel bigger." She paused. "She said that's rarer than it should be."

---

Dora found out Wednesday.

She called Prisca at eight AM — the same time as the Rachel Voss news, the same instinct. Prisca answered and said three sentences and Dora made the sound that her roommate had stopped being surprised by.

At Harlow Brew that afternoon Dora looked at Prisca across the table with the expression she reserved for things that genuinely mattered beneath the energy.

"New York," she said.

"New York," Prisca confirmed.

"All summer."

"All summer."

Dora was quiet for a moment — which was rare enough to be notable.

"I'm going to miss you," she said.

Simply. Without deflection.

Prisca looked at her.

"I know," she said. "I'll miss you too."

They looked at each other across the table with the warmth of two people who had been each other's constant for two and a half years and were learning to hold that warmth without requiring the proximity that had always accompanied it.

"You're going to be extraordinary," Dora said.

"I'm going to try," Prisca said.

"No." Dora was firm. "Not try. You're going to be. The trying is over." She paused. "The being has started."

---

That evening I told Abdullahi.

He listened to the full account — Voss's proposal, the associate producer credit, the summer timeline — with the focused attention he gave significant information.

When I finished he was quiet for a moment.

"How are you feeling about the separation?" he said.

"Good," I said. "Genuinely."

He looked at me with the assessing look.

"Not performing good," I said. "Actually good. It's the right thing for her and I know it and the knowing makes it easy."

He nodded slowly. "That is what it looks like when love is secure rather than anxious," he said. "You are not threatened by her growth."

"Why would I be?"

"Many people are," he said. Simply. "They do not understand that their partner's expansion does not require their diminishment."

I thought about my parents. The specific noise of two people who had sometimes, without meaning to, made their love into a competition.

"I understand that," I said.

"I know," Abdullahi said. "That is what I am observing."

---

The last week of April Prisca finished the Cleary Hill documentary.

Eleven minutes and forty seconds. Final edit. Color-corrected, sound-mixed, the Miss Patricia line sitting at the end where it had always been going to sit.

She submitted it to Webb on a Thursday.

He watched it that afternoon and sent her one line by email.

*This is finished. Submit it.*

She showed me the email.

"Submit it where?" I said.

"There's a student documentary festival in Boston in June," she said. "Webb wants me to submit it there." She paused. "And he cc'd the film studies department head on the email."

"The department head."

"Yes."

I looked at her.

"Submit it," I said.

She looked at the email for a moment longer.

Then she opened the festival submission portal.

Filled in the form.

Uploaded the film.

Pressed submit.

---

She closed the laptop and sat back.

The apartment quiet around her.

"Done," she said.

"Done," I agreed.

She looked at the cork board above her desk — the index cards and images and printed articles with their colored tabs. The visual map of a mind that thought in connections.

Something had shifted on the board in recent months. New cards. New connections. The Cleary Hill material woven through the Voss project material, threads running between them, everything talking to everything else.

"Next year," she said.

"What about it?"

"I want to keep going." She looked at the board. "The Cleary Hill film is done but the story isn't. The interim garden is approved but the permanent facility isn't built. Thomas's book isn't finished. Clara's album isn't released." She paused. "Everything is still becoming."

"Yes," I said.

"I want to keep being present for the becoming," she said. "All of it." She looked at me. "Here. With you. With the work."

I looked at her in the late April evening.

The cork board. The index cards. The film submitted. The summer ahead.

"Then that's what we do," I said.

She held my gaze.

Nodded once.

Slowly.

*Received. Understood. Kept.*

---

I went home and added a mark to the map.

Her apartment. The cork board. The film submitted.

Twenty-seven marks.

Each one a moment that had moved something forward.

Each one true.

Outside April made its final uncertain days toward May, the city greening slowly, everything becoming what it was always going to be.

Inside the notebook another paragraph arrived.

I wrote it down before it could leave.