Once More With Feeling by Megan Crane

never-to-be-discussed-aloud road trip to Savannah, Georgia, thatone spring break. The parade of crushes and, more rarely, actual boyfriends. The other girls we’d known and spent time with in and around the coffee houses, bars and cheap restaurants of lower Manhattan. There were a few photos at the truly fancy restaurants we’d visited very occasionally in those years, to celebrate things like birthdays or law school acceptance letters, both of us feeling so
grown up
.
    I stopped for a long time on a particular shot of us on our backpacking trip through Costa Rica. The two of us stood in front of a waterfall, our arms around each other, grins splitting open our faces. We looked a little bit grubby and darkly tanned, dressed exactly alike in faded jeans and black tank tops and hiking boots, though I thought now that that had probably been accidental – we’d dressed alike more often than not, yet it only seemed obvious later in the photos. We’d somehow been unaware of our similarities at the time. We’d been so young. We’d been all of twenty-three that summer, and we’d concentrated so fiercely on all the ways we were different. It seemed silly to me now, with clear evidence of the two of us dressed as twins.
    I could remember that particular hike so vividly. We’d trekked for what seemed like miles up the side of that mountain, giggling the whole way over the Australian boys we’d met at the beach in Manuel Antonio the previous day who we were supposed to meet up with again that night. I remembered exactly how I’d felt right beforewe’d flagged down another hiker, one half of an intimidatingly fit German couple, to take that shot. I’d been looking at the blue sky, the precious few clouds, the bright green trees and the impossibly beautiful waterfall that sketched its way over the hard rocks to the gleaming pool beneath. I’d been awed by the
immensity
of what I felt, what I was doing, what my life – our life – would entail. It had been
right there, waiting
. I had been so sure that if I just stretched out my hands far enough, I’d be able to touch it. Hold it. Shape it.
    And whatever that life might turn out to be, I’d known with a deep certainty that it would involve Brooke. I felt that sadness again now, a far richer strain. It worked through me as I set the photo aside and let out the breath I hadn’t known I’d been holding. She had been, in so many ways, the first great love of my life. More intimate and important than any of those boyfriends either one of us had had in those years. Sometimes I’d suspected that I lived through the drama of whatever boy it was simply to get to the part where Brooke and I dissected it all on our crappy old couch in the living room, such as it was, in our Alphabet City apartment.
    I picked up another handful of pictures and tossed them into the closest box, then another, and paused again. This time it was a picture of a tall, smoothly muscled and intense-looking man, his arms wrapped tight around me as we both looked into the camera, both of us in faded T-shirts, a picture-perfect Cape Cod beach arrayed behindus. He wasn’t smiling, though his dark eyes were bright. His hair was a shaggy mix of copper, blonde and brown, and framed his lean, clever face in a way that suggested that, left to its own devices, it might look leonine. I was leaning back against his chest with an ease that spoke of deep physical comfort with this man, and I was laughing at something – at Brooke, I remembered, who had taken that particular picture on that particular morning, though I couldn’t remember what she’d said to make me laugh like that, openmouthed and carefree.
    Nor could I remember when I’d laughed like that recently. I threw the picture in the box with the rest. But I didn’t pick up any more from the floor around me.
    That Cape Cod shot was one of three existing photographs of Dr Alec Frasier and me from that long, momentous year we’d been together. I shook my