My First Love

Chapter 39: May

May arrived with the full commitment spring had been promising since April.

The trees on the quad were properly green now — the real green, not the tentative early green of March but the settled, confident green of a season that had decided to stay. The mornings were warm. The evenings were long. The city had remembered that it was capable of being beautiful without effort.

Boston in May was a different city than Boston in November. Not better or worse. Just — more open. Like a person who has put down something heavy they had been carrying for months.

---

The end of semester arrived the way end of semesters arrive — suddenly, after seeming impossibly distant, all the deadlines converging into the same two-week window.

The field study final submission was due the second Friday of May.

Abdullahi and I had been working on the collaborative piece simultaneously — the two documents in conversation, the individual field study drawing on the structural framework, the collaborative piece grounded by the ethnographic evidence. Professor Holt had reviewed the field study draft in late April and returned it with detailed feedback and a single line at the top of the first page:

*This is the most complete undergraduate ethnographic study I have reviewed in seven years of teaching this course.*

I had stared at that line for a long time.

Then I had called Prisca.

"Read it to me," she said.

I read it.

A pause.

"Daniel," she said.

"I know."

"Cross the edge," she said. Soft. Certain. "All the way."

---

The final field study was forty-one pages.

Every conversation with Raymond and Gloria and Mrs. Chen and the twelve people in the Wednesday meetings and Jennifer Marsh and Alderman Osei's office and everyone else who had given me their time and their stories over five months.

The theoretical framework — Abdullahi's structural analysis woven through my ethnographic observation, the economic reality and the human texture together.

The methodology section that acknowledged its own position. That named participant observation honestly — that I had helped write the proposal, had sat at the folding table in Raymond's back room, had stood at the fence with the fresh flowers in March.

And the paragraph from page thirty-one.

The one Prisca had said was the whole thing.

I put it in the conclusion. Not as ornamentation — as argument. The most honest claim the data had produced, stated fully, without pulling back one step early.

---

I submitted it on Thursday evening.

One day before the deadline.

Not from procrastination — from the need to get it completely right.

Raymond called Friday morning.

He did not know about the submission specifically. He called about the site assessment final approval that had come through from the parks department — the formal, binding approval, not the preliminary. The interim garden was now officially scheduled for installation in June.

"It's real," he said.

"It's real," I agreed.

A pause.

"You know what Gloria did when I told her?" he said.

"What?"

"She went to the lot," he said. "Took her flowers. Stood at the fence." A pause. "Then she said — *Miss Patricia, we're getting somewhere.*"

---

I told Prisca immediately.

She was in her seminar when I texted — the last session of Webb's class, the final screenings of the finished student films.

She replied at noon.

*Gloria talked to Miss Patricia.* A pause. *That's going in the film.*

*The film is submitted,* I said.

*I'll add it as a title card at the end,* she said. *Webb said finished films can be updated before the festival if there's something essential.*

*Is that allowed?*

*I'm asking Webb now.*

Three minutes passed.

*He said yes. He said — "if the story is still moving, the film should move with it."*

---

The last session of Webb's seminar was a conversation rather than a screening.

Prisca told me about it that evening, sitting on my floor, the familiar position, the familiar warmth of an apartment that had absorbed a year of significant things.

"He asked each of us what we learned," she said. "Not about film. About ourselves."

"What did you say?"

She thought about it — not performing the thinking, actually doing it, the way she always did.

"I said I learned that I can be fully present in someone else's story without losing my own," she said. "That seeing clearly doesn't require detachment. That the camera can be both honest and warm." She paused. "And that the most important thing I found this semester had nothing to do with film technique."

"What was it?"

"That the people who keep showing up — Gloria at the fence, Raymond at the meetings, the twelve people on Wednesday evenings in January — they are not heroes and they are not exceptional. They are ordinary people who made a decision, quietly, to not stop." She paused. "And that ordinary persistence in the face of loss is the most interesting human thing I have ever filmed."

The apartment was quiet.

"Webb's response?" I said.

"He said — *that's the film. You just described it better than it describes itself.*"

---

Abdullahi submitted the collaborative piece the second Wednesday of May.

The journal was the *Harlow Undergraduate Research Review* — peer-reviewed, published twice yearly, the kind of publication that Abdullahi had identified in October as the appropriate destination for work of this kind.

He submitted it without ceremony — sent me a text that said: *Submitted. Now we wait.*

I replied: *How long for a response?*

*Six to eight weeks.*

*Are you confident?*

A pause.

*The argument is sound,* he said. *The evidence is complete. The methodology is transparent.* Another pause. *Yes. I am confident.*

From Abdullahi, that was the equivalent of certainty.

---

Peter submitted his paper the same week.

Different journal — a sociology undergraduate publication at a neighboring university that Abdullahi had also identified as appropriate. Peter had revised three times, with Sophie's structural help and Abdullahi's theoretical input and my own feedback on the Cleary Hill passages that he had gotten right in ways that still surprised me.

He texted me the morning of submission.

*It's in. If they reject it I'm blaming all three of you.*

Abdullahi replied: *They will not reject it.*

Sophie replied: *The belonging problem framing is original. They'll recognize that.*

I replied: *You wrote something real. That's all that matters.*

Peter's response came after a pause.

*Thank you,* he said. *All three of you.* Another pause. *And Dora, obviously, though she's not in this thread.*

Dora's community land trust paper had indeed contributed a footnote to the collaborative piece — Abdullahi had read it, confirmed it was competent, and incorporated it with appropriate citation. Dora had received this news with the expression of someone who had been told their work was in an Abdullahi footnote and understood exactly what that meant.

*I'm in a footnote,* she had said at dinner.

*You're in the evidence,* Abdullahi said. *That is where the truth lives.*

Dora had looked at him for a long moment.

Then she had said: "Abdullahi Hassan, you are genuinely one of the best people I know."

He had looked slightly uncomfortable with this.

"Thank you Dora," he had said.

---

The week before the last week of classes Prisca and I walked.

No destination — the May version of the walk we had taken through Cleary Hill in October, when the neighborhood had been cold and grey and the lot had been a vacant space with winter flowers at the fence.

We went back to Morrison Street.

The lot had changed.

Not the garden yet — installation was scheduled for June. But the fence had new signs on it — the city's formal approval notice, the neighborhood association's project description, a rendering of what the interim garden would look like.

And the flowers at the corner. Fresh white peonies this week.

Gloria had been here.

We stood at the fence for a while.

Prisca had her camera — the small one, the one she carried without formality, the one that was less equipment and more extension of how she saw.

She raised it.

Not at the flowers specifically. At the whole corner — the fence, the notice, the rendering, the peonies, the building behind, the May sky above.

She held it for a moment.

Then lowered it.

"Did you get it?" I said.

"Yes," she said.

"What did you see?"

She looked at the corner for a moment.

"Before and after in the same frame," she said. "The absence and the beginning of what's coming." She paused. "You can see both at once if you know where to look."

---

Walking back she was quiet for a while.

At some point she said: "My mother called last night."

"How is she?"

"Good. She asked about the summer. About New York." A pause. "She asked if I was nervous."

"Are you?"

"A little," she said. "Less than I expected." She paused. "She said something that I've been thinking about."

"Tell me."

"She said — *Prisca, you have spent your whole life preparing to be ready. At some point you have to let ready be enough.*"

I walked beside her in the May afternoon.

"She's right," I said.

"I know." Prisca looked at the street ahead. "I think I've known for a while. I just needed to hear it from her." She paused. "And from Webb. And from Voss." She glanced at me. "And from you."

"I've been saying it since October," I said.

"I know," she said. "I was listening. It just takes a few voices sometimes."

---

That evening I opened the notebook.

Fifty-six pages now. The thing that had started as a paragraph on the night of Thomas's sentence had become — I could see it now, clearly — a book.

Not finished. Not close to finished. But shaped, the architecture visible, the argument building the way good arguments build — from the specific to the true.

I read back through from the beginning.

It was about Cleary Hill — but it was also about more than Cleary Hill. It was about all the things the year had taught. Gloria's flowers. Raymond's mirror. Thomas's two coffee cups. Clara's four notes. The map with its marks. The girl by the window in September.

I did not know what to do with fifty-six pages that were becoming a book.

But I knew who to ask.

---

Sunday morning Prisca arrived with coffee and I handed her the pages.

All fifty-six.

She looked at them. Then at me.

"All of it?" she said.

"All of it," I said.

She sat in the armchair.

Read for an hour and twenty minutes.

When she finished she looked up.

Her expression was the full, open one — unguarded, completely present.

"Daniel," she said.

"Yes."

"This is a book," she said.

"I think so."

"I know so." She held the pages carefully. "Page forty-four. The paragraph about the map."

"Yes."

"Read it to me."

I turned to page forty-four.

Found the paragraph.

The morning was warm. The window was open. Boston in May coming through it — green and certain and full.

I read it aloud.

When I finished the room was quiet.

She looked at me with everything she had.

"Don't stop," she said.

"I won't," I said.

Outside the city was exactly itself.

Inside everything was becoming what it was always going to be.