“Are you excited for your first day of work tomorrow?”
I abandon my wrestling match with an IKEA box to look at Jamie. She’s standing in the middle of my brand-new living room in my brand-new apartment, hands on her sweatpants-clad hips. Over her shoulder, a fresh view peeks at me: the modern white apartment building across the street, the brilliant green treetops lining the sidewalks, and above it, a deep blue slice of cloudless sky. It’s the blue yonder, right here to greet me for my first weekend in Seattle.
I pull up the last piece of tape on the box, pushing it flat. “I’m a very nausea-inducing mix of excited and nervous. Is that weird? I’m not the new kid. I mean, I recruited half the people in that office, so they know and should love me from a financial standpoint, at the very least.”
“Bare minimum,” Jamie agrees.
“But I don’t know,” I say, looking around my new space. “I still have that new-kid feeling.”
She walks over, flopping down onto the floor next to me. “I know that pukey feeling well. I always get it when I’m about to do something badass. Usually reminding myself I’m about to do something badass sends it packing.”
“Am I doing something badass, though?”
“Georgia.” Jamie scoots until we’re facing each other, knees pressed together. Her expression is fierce and admonishing and full of love. She looks like a prickly kitten. “You’re so badass at your job they were like, ‘Here’s a promotion and more money and a relocation bonus because we love you so much, go be amazing.’ You’re starting over in a new state eight hundred miles”—she points a menacing finger at me—“but one phone call and plane ticket away from everything you’ve ever known. Hell yeah you’re nervous, but you’re excited because you know you’re doing
something amazing for yourself. You’re excited because you know you can do this.”
I nod, my throat thick.
“Does it feel right?” she asks.
I think about going into Nia’s office the day after I got back from Blue Yonder last month, the slick of my palms against the Blue Bottle lattes I’d bought for us. The slight shake in my voice when I told her I was accepting the director position, and that I could go up as soon as they needed me, which turned out to be as soon as I could get up there. I remember the way the knot in my stomach unraveled once I said it.
Since I made that decision, I’ve vacillated wildly between excitement and nervousness. I’ve even questioned the decision a few times. I certainly would never classify moving up here as being badass.
But here I am, sitting in my apartment with Jamie, and underneath the excitement and anxiety is another emotion that feels like peace. It reminds me of my early summers at Blue Yonder; I knew it was special, but it didn’t belong to me yet. I had to settle into the feeling over time, trust it slowly.
That’s how this tiny one-bedroom in South Lake Union feels to me now. “Yeah,” I say. “It feels right.”
“Then that’s what matters,” Jamie says, wrapping her arms around my waist.
I smack a kiss on her head. “Thank you.”
“That was a good pep talk, right? Like, on a scale from one to ten, what am I looking at?”
“An easy twelve,” I confirm.
“Twelve! Blake would chastise you for going off scale.” “But it’s just us right now,” I say. “So you get a twelve.”
She hums, then tightens her hold on me. “God, I’m going to miss you.”
For the thirtieth time this weekend, my eyes fill with tears. “Jamie, what the hell? You promised you wouldn’t make me cry if I let you help me move up here.”
“That’s on you for not knowing I was lying,” she says, pulling back just as a tear streaks down her cheek.
We stare at each other, faces still soggy from the last crying jag we went on, before dissolving into laughter. Our goodbye is imminent, and the thought of doing it hurts, even though we’ll be fine. We’ll do anything for each other, and I know more than ever that if either of us aren’t doing enough, we’ll say it out loud.
With a sigh, Jamie rests her cheek on my shoulder. We lapse into comfortable silence, soaking in our last hour together before I have to send her back home. It’s strange that the same word can mean different places, and yet the feeling exists when we’re together, too, no matter where we are geographically. What a comforting thought.
“Okay, enough sad-girl shit.” Jamie straightens and wipes her palms down her wet cheeks. She does the same to me, grinning when I laugh. “What else can we knock off your very comprehensive to-do list before we have to go to the airport?”
I give her a sideways look, biting my lip. “Okay, I have a confession.” “What?”
“I lost my to-do-list notebook,” I say, then clap my hands over my mouth.
Her eyes widen. “What?”
“I can’t find it anywhere.” There are pages and pages of items with all the things I need to do and buy, the companies I need to call for service setups, even local restaurants and shops I want to check out. I’ve been carrying it with me everywhere, but Jamie and I have been to practically every storefront in Seattle. There’s no way I’ll track it down.
“So, wait. Have you just been…winging it?”
“Kind of,” I groan. “I’ve got a half-rewritten list on my Notes app, but it’s not as comprehensive, and I’ve been too overwhelmed to panic about it. I’m running on gut instinct, mostly.”
Jamie blinks at me, the surprised O of her mouth curling out until she’s grinning. “Georgia, you don’t even go to the corner store without a list. Are you telling me we went to Target yesterday and you dropped five hundred dollars on things you didn’t need?”
“I needed most of them!”
“Those sweatpants?” she volleys back, pointing at the tie-dyed pair that match hers.
“They’re a keepsake,” I say defensively, curling my legs under me. “It’s the leisure equivalent of us looking at the same stars at the same time when we’re not together.”
“And that rug you were arguing with yourself over for ten minutes?” Jamie continues.
I run my hand along the multicolored rug I now own, spread beneath me on the hardwood floor. My old neutral rug is currently in a moving truck on its way up to Seattle with the rest of my furniture; I didn’t need this. But it felt like a requirement to help turn my blank slate of white walls, pale hardwood, and chrome appliances into a space that feels like mine. It’s my favorite thing in the apartment.
“I knew it wasn’t on my list,” I admit. “I just wanted it.”
Jamie shakes her head in wonder. “My baby’s growing up. See what happens when you throw your lists in the fire? You end up with gorgeous rugs.”
It’s those two words—list and fire—that make my mind slip into its Eli- shaped space. I think about the list we followed for five years before he set it aflame, about the list we left back at Blue Yonder, the one that lit that dormant spark between us again, and about the much more nebulous one we’re following now. The one that’s keeping us friends.
It’s been a month since I shut the cottage door behind me the morning after Adam’s wedding, Eli’s paper ring looped around my thumb and all of my emotions wrung out. Now that ring sits on top of the Converse box that maintained a place of honor in the back seat while Jamie and I road-tripped up a few days ago. I eye it on the bookshelf, my heart diving the way it does anytime I think of Eli these days.
Which is always.
Jamie follows my sight line, arching an eyebrow. She’s well aware of the bombshell conversation Eli and I had the night of Adam and Grace’s wedding. I unloaded it over drinks the following week, grateful she listened
without voicing her opinion, though I could see the question in her eyes over the way we’d agreed to move forward.
We haven’t talked about him this weekend, but I don’t miss her sly awareness when he texts, which is regularly.
It started with a text the day he left for LA. Once I’d gotten home, I stress-cleaned while recounting every moment I’d spent with Eli in blissful, painful detail. Even though we hadn’t said the word out loud, the feeling in my chest was as heavy as goodbye, and I had no idea what came next. We hadn’t talked about what friendship looked like between us, what the rules were.
Then my phone dinged with a text from him.
Not saying goodbye or anything. Just letting you know I landed safely earlier and got picked up by this random guy
Right after that text was a picture of Eli and his dad. They looked like twins—golden skin, dark eyes and hair, lethal eyelashes, the same quiet smiles. Even with the purple smudges under his eyes, Eli looked beautiful. God, I’d just seen him the night before, had fallen asleep with his hand in mine and woken up in the middle of the night with his face buried in my neck, and now we were hundreds of miles away.
Mooching off any ride you can get from the airport, huh? I
replied so I wouldn’t send a string of I miss yous.
His response was almost immediate: Besides preferring to be chauffeured by someone who knows my middle name, Ubers are expensive and I’m unemployed
Not for long, I wrote back.
For a few minutes he didn’t respond. I stared at my phone in my dark, quiet apartment, waiting for him.
Sorry, my dad won’t stop hassling me to tell you he says hi. I had to lock myself in the guest room to get away from him
I thought back to his dad’s DM months ago, the miss you, kiddo that nearly broke me. But this felt like a tether.
Tell him I say hi back and to hassle you anytime I’ll pass on the first part of the message, instigator
I laughed, then held my breath while the text bubble popped up and disappeared and popped up again.
Finally, a text appeared and my heart spiraled out of my body.
I miss you, it said, followed by a lightning-quick, as a friend.
The relief of being able to text back I miss you, followed by the frustration of the safe but inadequate add-on, also as a friend, was so strong that my eyes stung. I missed him in every way possible, but at least I could say it this way. It was a boundary I was grateful for, even though I simultaneously resented it.
He’s been so steady with his communication since, and I soak up every morning message, every picture of his most recently completed puzzle (I know how hot this is, he texts, try to contain yourself) or a Georgia license plate he’s seen in the wild (Found you). In return, I text the silliest, most mundane things. I just want to know he’s there, and he always is. I didn’t realize how much I missed it until I had it back—an Eli to rely on. An Eli who’s present and diligent, who feels like mine in a way.
Just not in the way my heart wants.
“It’s looking so good in here, Peach Pit,” Jamie says, pulling me away from my thoughts. “Once your furniture’s here, it’s going to really be yours. I’ll have to come back to see the finished product, of course.”
“Of course,” I agree, unhooking my claw clip from the hem of my ratty T-shirt. Twisting my hair up, I secure it with the clip, then take in my space. “I worried it would feel boring or empty, but even without all my stuff here, it feels familiar already.” I lean back on my hands, looking over at her. “This is the first time I’m living somewhere that’s just mine. Isn’t that wild?”
Jamie’s eyebrows shoot up. “Seriously?”
I nod. “Obviously I lived with my dad growing up, then had various roommates in college. Then I was living in New York with Eli.” I barely trip over his name and the memory, and that feels like progress. Warmer things have replaced it. “And then you. But even after you moved out, it felt like our place, you know?”
“Always will be,” Jamie says with authority. “And now this place gets to be yours. How’s it feel?”
I inhale deeply, looking around. “It feels…right. Like it’ll be home.” “Just remember you have another home to come back to,” she says,
taking my hand.
I squeeze her fingers in mine. “I know.”
Her eyes fill again and I see her revisiting the same memories I am: packing up my stuff with Adam, Grace, and Blake, making a party out of it, saying an official goodbye to the space that saw so many of my highs and lows, that grew my friendship with Jamie into what it is right now. We even FaceTimed Eli, and for every second I heard his voice over the phone I wished that I was hearing it in person.
He’s got his own thing going on, I told myself, though I still don’t know what that thing is. He didn’t end up taking the job he said was a lock— Didn’t work out, he texted when I asked about it, but I’ve got other things lined up—and sidesteps the subject otherwise. It’s the only thing we don’t talk about, besides loving one another.
But I get to come back to him like I do Jamie and Adam and Grace and Blake, a home-shaped place. That’s so much better than what we had for five years.
And if it’s worse than what we had for eight days, I do my best not to think about it.
