Just Remember to Breathe (10 page)

I did what I sometimes do best. I ran away fast. The morning after our fight, I enlisted in the US Army.

Is it any wonder that lying here in my bed at Columbia two years later, I wasn’t able to get to sleep?

Instead of sleeping, I thought of holding her in my arms.

I thought of the literally hundreds of emails we’d sent back and forth.

I thought of the hundreds of hours we’d spent on the phone, talking about our lives, our dreams.

After running with her in the early morning it was hard to forget how much I loved her, and I needed to forget. Because the one thing I couldn’t forget, or forgive for that matter, was the last conversation we had. Kowalski had been killed that morning, and we’d returned to base, shaken, horrified by his death. It was the low point in our deployment for most of us, and certainly for me. I desperately needed to talk. I needed her. Worse than I ever had before. And when I got her on Skype, she was fucking drunk. That much was obvious.
 

I tried to tell her what was going on, but she brushed me off. She started telling me it wasn’t working, that we couldn’t be together. And then, I saw the one thing I never expected to see. A guy, walking past her in her room, with his shirt off. As he passed her, his hand briefly touched her shoulder.

Even thinking about it makes me want to vomit. It makes me want to scream with rage. I’m not over it. I don’t think I’ll ever get over it. And while I can spend all day long thinking about how much I love her, I can’t forget that moment. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t say anything. I reached out and closed the connection. I logged on to Facebook and disabled my profile. I deleted my Skype account. I erased my digital identity. Then I took the laptop and smashed it.
 

The next morning we went back out into the field.
 

It was weeks before I got a chance to get to my email again. For reasons I’ll never understand, my mother brought me a used laptop when I was at Walter Reed.
 

I had about twenty messages from her. For one aching moment, I almost read them. I couldn’t do it. But I couldn’t delete them either. So I stuck them in an archive folder where I wouldn’t have to see them. And I tried to forget.
 

Like a lot of other things in my life, I did a pretty crappy job of forgetting.

I don't understand either one of you (Alex)

“Alex, I need your help,” Kelly said the moment I walked into the room.

“Hey there. What’s up?” I asked, setting my bag down next to the bed. I settled in on the bed, curling around one of my pillow.

She looked at me, then said, “Okay, so … I think Joel may be coming around.”

I rolled my eyes. “Oh come on, Kelly. He just wants to be out there, getting laid.”

“You don’t know that.”

“What makes you think differently?”

She leaned back, her back against the wall, her legs hanging off the side of her bed. It looked extremely uncomfortable.

“Well,” she replied. “I told you he asked me out on Friday. I turned him down again. So he sends me a poem.”

“Oh, no, he didn’t.”

She nodded, grinning. “It was awful. But really sweet, too.”

“I didn’t know he wrote poetry.”

“Well… don’t tell him I said this, but he really shouldn’t.”

I burst out laughing.
 

“So… this morning I was in Doctor Abernathy’s office.” Kelly was also on work-study, and spent two mornings a week as a receptionist at Columbia University Medical Center. “And a courier comes in. With a bouquet of hollyhock.”

“A bouquet of
what?
”

“Come on, Alex. It’s only my favorite flower. Point is, he remembered. He didn’t send me a dozen roses, which would be nice, but unoriginal. Instead, he sent me something he knew I would love.”

“Okay, that’s really sweet, I’ll admit it.”

“Okay, so he wants to go out Saturday. And I really want to. But… not alone. Not the first time. I need my best friend along.”

“Won’t that be awkward?”

“Not if you bring a date.”

“Um… no.”

“
Alex!
Come on!”

“Seriously, no. There’s no one I’m even remotely interested in dating.”

Now she rolled her eyes. “Oh yeah, right. I see. Let me think. I’m trying to think of a guy you can ask.”

“Good luck with that,” I replied.

“Oh, I know,” she said, her voice sarcastic. “Let me think… I bet there’s someone you see every other day at work-study. And spend hours with. And then on the other days you get up at a nightmare hour to go running with. Eww. Seriously.”

“Kelly, stop. It’s not like that.”

She sat up straight and threw a pillow at me. “Come on, Alex! You’re my friend. I need you on this. And it’s not like you don’t spend six days a week with him anyway!”

“Yeah, but those aren’t dates!”

I was telling the truth. Even though he hadn’t asked me to come again, I’d been showing up at six a.m. every other day. We ran together, sometimes in silence. This morning, in fact, we’d gone almost three miles. To be honest, I was secretly pleased I’d been able to keep up. And at least once or twice a week we had breakfast. Or coffee, after leaving the rare manuscripts library. But we weren’t dating. And, by and large, we’d avoided the kind of talk that had gotten us into trouble a couple weeks ago. We were following the rules, and it was working, and I didn’t want to ruin it.

I held my breath, thinking, hard. I really didn’t want to ruin it.
 

I swallowed, then said, “All right. But it won’t be a date.”

“Whatever, Alex.”

I smiled at Kelly.
 

She said, “Thanks.”

“Don’t be surprised if he turns me down.”

“I don’t understand either one of you.”

I sighed. “I don’t either.”

Flowers from Afghanistan (Dylan)

Bad idea, I thought. Really bad idea. First of all, it was a Saturday night, and I was walking to Alex’s dorm room to meet her and pick her up for our non-date. Or our non-date date? Undate? Whatever. We were going to a bar, where people would be drinking, and loud, and obnoxious, and my only tenuous connection to reality would be the one person I could not reach out to.

This was a really fucking bad idea.

I checked my phone. Ten after ten already. I was late. I quickly sent her a text.
 

BE THERE IN A MOMENT SORRY LATE

She wrote back damn near instantly.
 

Ok. Hugs. :)

Oh, come on. Seriously? Hugs? That was the absolute last thing either one of us needed to be doing.

After our way-too-open morning run and breakfast, I’d worked hard to reestablish normality. It was necessary. But we were still spending a huge amount of time together. The next Thursday morning, at six am, she’d shown up on the green without a word, in running shoes and a significantly less revealing outfit than the first day. That was a relief. If she’d only known how my breath had caught when I’d seen her that first day.

Better she didn’t.

So, not only did I follow her rules, I made up my own.

No flirting.

No excessive eye contact.

Above all, nothing that could be misconstrued as a date.

I was protecting myself, but I was also protecting her. And then, Friday afternoon, after we left the library, she approached me about tonight.
 

“It’s for Kelly,” she said. Kelly and her boyfriend, whatever his name is, are on the verge of getting back together. This is the first time they’re going out since they broke up, and Kelly needs a buffer, something to keep them from getting into a huge fight or something. But three is a crowd, and going as two couples wouldn’t be so painfully awkward, she said.

Yeah, sure it wouldn’t.

I found the building and hit the buzzer for her room.

She buzzed me in.

Damn. I’d hoped she’d just meet me down here. Seeing her room was going to be awkward in its own way. Somehow we’d managed to avoid that level of intimacy. And I desperately needed to keep my distance.

Whatever.

So I worked my way up the stairs to the fourth floor. This had been my own personal challenge for the past week. Never take an elevator when there were stairs. In two weeks of running, more strength had returned to my right leg than I’d felt in a long time. I was a long way from whole, but I was even further away from where I’d been seven months ago, when they were debating whether or not to cut off my leg.

On the fourth floor, I followed the room numbers to hers, then knocked. A cute chalk-board was attached to the door, saying simply
Kelly and Alex.

“Be right there!” I heard her call. She opened the door, and I caught my breath.

Oh, my God.
 

Her hair was in some kind of complicated bun on the back of her head, with long tresses hanging down over her shoulders in a very loose curl. She wore a dark green sleeveless dress, cut just above the knee, that hugged her form perfectly. I took a shallow breath. She’d done something with her makeup. Her deep green eyes looked huge.

Color flew to her cheeks when she looked at me. Both of us averted our eyes.

“Come on in, I’ll be ready in just a second,” she said.

Nervous as hell, I followed her into the room.

It was obvious which side was Alex’s.
 

Kelly’s side of the room was swathed in pink, movie and band posters, huge fluff pillows.

Alex’s was subdued. A world map hung over her desk, and a stack of books was loosely arranged on one side of the desk.
 

A picture frame contained pressed and dried flowers. A date was written on the backing of the frame, just below the flowers.
November 19
th
, 2011.

Those were the flowers I sent her when I was in Afghanistan, last year.

On the bureau was a picture that nearly ripped my heart out. It was the two of us, curled up together. I remembered when it was taken. We were in Haifa, at a park near the Central Carmel. I’d been playing guitar most of the night, and when I stopped, we curled up together, laughing and talking. I had a copy of the same photo.

I averted my eyes, trying to keep my breathing calm.
 

“I’m ready,” she said, coming out of the restroom. She looked at me, then her eyes darted to the picture, the flowers, and her cheeks colored. We avoided each other’s eyes as we left the room.

She headed for the stairs, even in her heels, which looked impossible to walk in, and also impossibly sexy. That dress complemented by a tiny wrap over her shoulders, hugged her body in a way that made my pulse rush in my temples. I shook my head. This was Alex trying to take care of me, because she knew I’d sworn off elevators. I couldn’t help but scan her entire body with my eyes as she walked ahead of me a few steps. Holy shit, but she was beautiful. This is going to sound crazy obnoxious, but I wanted nothing more at that moment than to lay her down, take her legs in my hands and lick her calves.
 

This was going to be a long, long night.

“We can take the elevator,” I said.

“They’re just heels, it’s fine.”

I shrugged.

When we got to the street, I said, “So, I got an email from my friend Sherman.”

“Oh yeah?”

I nodded. “He’s coming home next week, and said he wants to come to New York for a couple weeks. I think he’s thinking about college up here.”

“Oh wow, that’s exciting!”

“It’ll be strange. That part of my life and this part of my life… they don’t really connect. It’s hard to imagine having him here.”
 

“We’ll show him the town,” she said. “It’ll be good for you to have a friend here.”

I took a sharp shallow breath at her use of the word
we
. Every moment I spent with this girl was a show of restraint. Hard to imagine as it was, I’d had a lot of sleepless nights lately. She was busy making plans for “us” and I was trying my hardest to keep my distance. Maintaining that distance was killing me. I loved her, but honestly, part of me hated her too.

I tensed up as we approached the 1020 Bar. A small crowd of people stood out front smoking. Inside it looked like a madhouse. Extremely loud music, people packed in like it was a Japanese subway. Screaming and shouting. It sounded like a band was playing inside.

Unconsciously I slowed to a stop as we approached the door.
 

“You okay?” she asked. “You look a little pale.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I don’t do well with crowded places any more.”

“I’ll stay close,” she said.
 

That ought to help me relax.
Yeah, right.
 

She took my arm, curling herself close to me, and we walked into the bar. She was scanning the crowd, looking for Kelly and boyfriend, whose name I couldn’t recall.

After a few minutes pushing our way through the crowd, we found them sitting at a tall round table with four stools around it.

I froze when I saw the boyfriend.

“Dylan, this is Kelly and Joel. Kelly and Joel, this is Dylan.”

Kelly smiled, a huge grin, and said, “Wow. Dylan, it is so cool to finally get to meet you.”

Joel held out his hand to shake, and said, “Hey man, yeah, it’s good to finally meet you. I’ve heard so much.”

I stared into the face of the man I’d seen in the Skype video. The shirtless guy who had been in Alex’s room the night I broke it off with her for good. I couldn’t breathe, and my eyes darted to Alex, who was starting to look concerned, then I looked back at him and muttered, “Motherfucker.”
 

I shook my arm free from Alex, turned and pushed my way through the crowd back to the exit.

Um, yeah. I better see a doctor (Alex)

“What the hell?” Kelly asked when Dylan pushed away from us and almost ran for the door.

“I don’t know!” I said, my voice rising into a near wail. What was wrong? What had I done?
 

“Go after him, Alex. Don’t let him go without an explanation. Not again!”

I was shaking, and breathing fast, shallow breaths. Freaking out. A vision of all those weeks I’d spent in February and March, mostly curled up in my bed, crying.