My First Love

Chapter 21: Winter Break

She left for Portland on a Friday.

The last Friday of the semester — campus already half-emptied again, the familiar pre-break migration of students and luggage and hasty goodbyes. The weather had committed fully to winter now, the kind of cold that meant business, the Charles River grey and flat under a sky that had forgotten about blue.

I drove her to Logan.

She had not asked me to. I had offered Tuesday and she had looked at me with the brief, considering expression she used when deciding whether to accept something gracious without making it complicated.

"Okay," she had said.

---

The drive was easy.

She was a good car companion — present without needing to fill every silence, comfortable looking out the window at the city moving past. She had her small notebook open on her knee and was writing something in it, not ignoring me, just using the time.

I did not ask what she was writing.

Some things did not need to be asked.

At a red light on the expressway she looked over at me.

"You're going to be here the whole break?" she said.

"Most of it. I'll go to Chicago for Christmas week."

"Good," she said simply. "You should go."

"My mother agrees with you."

"Your mother sounds sensible." She went back to her notebook. "I'll tell her you said so when I meet her."

I looked at the road ahead.

*When I meet her.*

Said naturally. No performance, no weight placed on it deliberately. Just the easy assumption of a future that included that.

I did not comment on it.

But I felt it settle somewhere important.

---

Logan Airport had the particular chaos of a pre-holiday Friday — lines and luggage and the compressed energy of a thousand people going somewhere.

At the departures entrance she got out and I got her bag from the back and stood on the sidewalk with the cold coming off the harbor.

She took the bag and looked at me.

"Two weeks," she said.

"Two weeks."

"I'll text."

"I know."

She stepped forward and kissed me — warm and deliberate, her free hand at my face, unhurried despite the airport noise around us. When she stepped back her expression was open.

"Merry Christmas, Daniel," she said.

"Merry Christmas, Prisca."

She turned and went through the doors.

I stood on the sidewalk until the doors closed behind her.

---

The first week of break was quiet in the way I had expected.

Good quiet — the chosen kind, not the imposed kind. I worked on a paper I wanted to get ahead of for the new semester. I ran in the mornings, the cold making it harder and therefore more satisfying. I cooked actual meals, which I did not always bother with during the semester.

Abdullahi was still in Boston for the first week — his family gathering was Christmas week, same as mine. We had dinner twice, the easy companionship of two people who did not require conversation to fill every space.

One evening over food he asked about Prisca with the directness he brought to everything.

"How is she?"

"Good. Portland. Working on the sample reel remotely."

"And you two?"

I thought about the airport. *When I meet her.*

"Good," I said. "Better than good."

He nodded with the satisfied expression of someone whose calculations had proven correct. "I expected that," he said.

"You expected everything," I said.

"Not everything," he said, with rare honesty. "But the important things."

---

Prisca texted with the comfortable frequency of someone who thought of you often and did not make a production of it.

Not constant — she had her own days, her family, the sample reel she was assembling on her laptop at her mother's kitchen table, which she described as chaotic in the warm way of a family kitchen that was regularly occupied by people who loved each other loudly.

The texts arrived at intervals. A line about something her mother had said. A question about a section of the Ellis proposal she was revisiting for the Voss reel. A photo, once — not of herself, but of the view from her bedroom window in Portland, a street lined with bare trees, wet pavement, a grey sky that looked different from Boston's grey.

*This is what December smells like here,* she wrote.

I looked at the photo for a long time.

*Pine and wet concrete,* I wrote back.

*Exactly,* she said.

---

I went to Chicago the twenty-third.

My mother met me at the door with a hug that lasted longer than usual and the immediate observation that I looked well, which she said with the specific emphasis of a mother identifying a cause.

"You look well, Daniel," she said, stepping back to look at me. "Very well."

"Thank you Mom."

"Is it the girl?"

"Hello to you too."

She laughed and let me in.

---

Christmas with my family was the warm complicated version it always was.

My parents in the same house for the holiday, the old rhythms between them both familiar and strange, the love underneath the history real even when the history was loud. My younger cousin Marcus who was fourteen and had decided this year to have opinions about everything. My aunt Helen who cooked enough food for three times the people present and took it as a personal victory when you had seconds.

On Christmas morning my mother found me at the kitchen table with coffee before everyone else was up.

She sat across from me with her own cup.

"Tell me about her," she said. No preamble. No pretense.

So I told her.

The registrar's hall and the window. The library and the bookstore. The coffee on Harlow Avenue and the documentary at the Brattle. The map with twenty marks. The research proposal. The way Prisca said exactly what she meant and meant exactly what she said.

My mother listened the way good listeners do — fully, without preparing her response while I was still speaking.

When I finished she was quiet for a moment.

"She sounds like someone who knows herself," she said finally.

"She does," I said. "Completely."

"Those people are rare." She wrapped her hands around her cup. "And they make the people around them better. Not by trying to — just by being what they are."

I thought about Ellis's feedback. *Stopped one step early.* Prisca's voice: *Cross the edge.*

"Yes," I said. "Exactly that."

My mother smiled — warm and knowing and a little relieved in the way mothers are when they see their children choosing well.

"Bring her to Chicago," she said. "When you're ready."

"I will," I said.

---

I flew back to Boston the twenty-eighth.

Prisca was back the thirtieth.

I spent the twenty-ninth cleaning my apartment with unusual thoroughness and adding a mark to the map — O'Hare Airport, departures level, where I had stood waiting to board my flight back and realized I was genuinely glad to be returning.

Not because Chicago had been bad.

Because Boston had become home.

And I knew, standing there in the airport, exactly why.