Though Cal had made it clear he didn’t want to leave me or Rosie behind, I couldn’t rationalize picking up and leaving everything I had grown to know. It was a romantic notion to think the decision was as simple as packing a bag and hoping the light of our love would somehow guide our way, but my heart was quieted by a mind that didn’t allow it to have its say. Loving Cal had enriched my life, but it hadn’t eradicated countless years of mourning the move from a country I had never understood to one I related to even less. I doubted I would ever be a person so free to push past the fucked-up pieces that made me.

“I won’t go without you,” Cal said crossly. As if his declaration had the power to distinguish my doubt. I wanted to, more than anything I wanted to be a person who could pick up and go in any which way the wind blew.

“I don’t want you to,” I admitted, wanting to keep him for as long as I could.

“California is supposed to be incredible,” he tsked, as though my statement was a grave disappointment. “Gorgeous weather, the ocean, liberal thought.”

“Earthquakes,” I added. “We wouldn’t only feel as though the bottom was falling out from underneath us, it actually would be.”

He rolled his eyes, though I could see amusement beyond the aggravation. “I’ll dream of it then. Live there in my fantasies.”

Holding onto Cal was harnessing the sea, his force constantly threatening to break away from me

“You’ll resent me won’t you, if you don’t go?” I muttered days later, burying my face into the soft skin at the base of his neck. “And then what?”

“Then we’ll be like any other couple who has loved each other for a long time,” he teased, kissing the top of my head.

I closed my eyes, wondering if people could identify their last moment of happiness before it passed them by. There must be a moment before one dies where their thoughts fade to fear as they slip into an uncharted abyss. Maybe we all leave the Earth as we entered it—afraid. When I died, I wanted to hold on to every happy time with him, wrap myself in their warmth as I faced the cold uncertainty beyond the given. His first step out of my life would be the beginning of my demise. While I would continue to breathe, I would cease to live. Any joy I’d found in Cal would follow him on the freeway as he traveled away from me. Pathetically, I would’ve preferred to have Cal resent me as the barnacle I had become rather than allow him to rid himself of me. I wanted him to stay even if he wanted to go.