I spent most of my winter break in the sunbeam that filtered through the glass back door. 

Just off Exit 13, round the highway building and its mounds of road salt, the truck stop and the soccer field, I lay insignificant in my warm spot for the months of December and January. (I occasionally mixed in a long jog down the train tracks, my blip of an existence somewhat more noticeable on the minds of strangers with accidentally overlapping routines.) 

It was in the sunbeam that I felt a shameful urge to search his name. 

Happy birthday old man. 

The words came easy for once. Rather than roll around in my brain, they slid off my hands and I had pressed send before I’d even stopped to appreciate how much had changed. I sat in the warmth and counted the months. Counted the times I saw his car pass me on my walk to class. The times his routine collided with mine. The birthday parties missed and the awkward hellos avoided. 

I hadn’t wept over it in months. The mornings that once felt back-breakingly heavy were easy again. I thought about it, yes, but I thought about it on runs and out with my friends, doing things that had felt Herculean to attempt when I thought it all fell apart. 

Pittsburgh’s 58.35 square miles contain 302,971 lives. It should not be so surprising to me that I hardly see him. But it is anyways. 

I wax poetically to my mother from the sun-drenched floor, nearly convincing myself that I am happy he is happy. I am happy he is gone. The end was for the best. She looks down at me with  something between pity and understanding. 

“I am happy to be strangers again.” The words coil and hiss around my tongue. 

I do not see him grow older. One day he just happens to be. 

I see him across the street in March and his hair is long again. I will not know if or when he plans to cut it. I don’t ask.

I cut my own, I spend half a paycheck turning it blonde and he will never tell me he thinks it looks nice. I will never think that maybe he’s lying. 

But I run into his friend at the bar and he says it suits me well. 

When I sign my first Enough Money To Fill My Tank Every Time I Stop For Gas job offer, my fingers itch to grab his attention again. 

Tell me I’m doing this right. Tell me I’m capable and correct. Tell me I am worthwhile and you will miss me one day when I’m gone. 

I have vinyls he’s never listened to and sweaters he’s never touched and recipes he’s never tried. I blow out my candles at 21 and the room is full of people who are not him. When I wake at 2AM with a sharp stab in my ribcage, I can’t shake him awake in fear. He is in someone else’s bed, nursing her phantom pains and chronic anxieties. 

When our routines collide, it is for a moment in time. I see him stroll past Starbucks between classes. I think of how many people walking past this coffee shop window know that I met him in this seat and that I like the feeling of sunlight first thing in the morning and last night I had a sharp pain in my side again. 

I think of how we were all strangers once and so many of us will be strangers again. 

Lizzie and I split an American Spirit in line for the bar. I approach this habit with indifference and a bit of  shame. But he has never met Lizzie and never seen me with a cigarette between my fingers. 

If I am not smoking, I am biting my nails or twirling my hair or twiddling about. I am filling the space where I once drummed my fingers against his thigh, finding a place to put the aimless, sputtering energy I pushed into him.  

My search history would concern my therapist: 

my breakup gave me ADHD? 

when is it embarrassing to still be writing about your ex 

non-prescription sedatives 

how to convince your mother you are no longer in danger of driving your car off the overpass 

I am aiming to replace my hand-wringing and knuckle-cracking with first dates and  getting-to-know-you messages. This, somewhat annoyingly, involves retelling every story he had once loved. I remark in my journal how frustrating it is to be reminded of him in everyone I meet. 

New faces crinkle up and laugh when I tell them about my forcible-removal from  preschool graduation. My tiny fist making contact with a bully’s fleshy cheek. My little gold regalia turned into a WWE costume.  

I censor tales of myself down on the shore. His name is redacted, his roles played by a friend or stranger. I tell a boy about the time I drove up the coast of Maine. I show him pictures of my smiling, tired face on a rocky beach. He does not ask who took it, or who woke me up and dragged me out of the tent to watch the sunrise, or who I pulled into freezing Northeast waves amidst the rain. 

But eventually, I get through the stories of old and into the space between. There are months, going on years, of time that goes unaccounted for in his memory. Places I’ve been and tales I’ve told that he will never laugh at over dinner.

If we meet again we will be strangers once more. 

There are other sunbeams to be enjoyed. 

There’s the worn wooden dock of the boy I meet at work. The lake is flat and still, the kind where boat wakes leave scars on its surface. 

Baking in the late August sun with a boy who just recently became more than a stranger, the birds chirp and I am discovering the refreshing emptiness of accepting the end before the start. He is not my person and I am not his, so neither of us pretend. We have little more in common than the sweat on our temples and sleepy morning swims across the lake. He meets my parents only by unfortunate accident.  

There’s the living room morning light where my roommate and I rest for a little too long each day. 

When we lived in an impossibly small room together as naive, excitable 18-year-olds, we’d lay with our heads out the windows and tell stories about the people on the street below. We watched parades and traffic jams with the whimsy of children. The day it begins I am crying in her bed until the tears turn to manic laughs. Maybe she will be a stranger too one day, maybe her role will fade like the rest. For now, she is here. 

There are sunbeams in Montana, the kind that turn the dirt pale and hot against the soles of my feet, that I touch once and never again. There will be Christmas morning light in my parents’  home that will one day belong to someone else. There will be rays through plane windows and  car windshields and across trails that I will run down only once and go home another way. 

Two weeks before my graduation, he stumbles up beside me at the bar and smiles at me beneath the brim of his hat. He smells like stale beer and green tea shots, and he still hasn’t cut his hair. The lights come up for last call and I can see the glassy surface of his eyes. 

Lizzie takes me to the curb and lights me a cigarette. I do not see him leave, I don’t know where he goes when the bars close. 

And there is a beauty in the end of it all.