The turtles in the pond have been decaying since I got here. Since before I got here. I wonder how many soulmates each of them have had. If they feel more than pain, fear, and joy. Surely turtles can love, but in the haze of my confusion I recall that rabbits are the ones who mate for life, as well as eagles and lobsters, and I have no clue what I’m talking about which is almost always the case.

The first time I took mushrooms in a vain attempt to feel cool, I walked out to this very turtle pond in a crew neck that was too big for me, and I started crying when I realized that this was what captivity looked like. Turtles in the pond of a liberal arts college too understaffed to take care of them properly. Their home was covered in algae and it stunk of something rotten, certainly not fit for the needs of these sweet reptiles that stared at you as you walked by. The pain of this realization left me in too much of an inebriated state to look away from the horror, and it prevented me from doing anything but kneeling by the edge of the pond and sinking my slick toes into the mulch and debris. Carol, our psychedelic trip sitter, rubbed my back as the inner child in me lifted itself from its crib and shook the handlebars violently: “But they can’t get out! They don’t even know what they’re missing.”

Carol laughed at this seemingly ridiculous and unrelated assertion and our friend Nettie, higher than the two of us, walked in circles around the pond, muttering something about how the sky was too big for us to understand. The bushes around the pond got smaller, shriveling up underneath the weight of my sadness, and I failed to hold my body up. I slowly fell from a squat to a fetal position, and I asked questions that weren’t being heard. Ones that couldn’t be answered. Do they have friends? Have they ever been in love? Do you think they would want to be here or somewhere like Montana, like New York? How do we make it stop? Soon the emptiness of pet turtles living in their rotting ecosystem lost its importance, and I became tired of feeling responsible for someone else’s actions. But I didn’t need overpriced and shorthanded drugs to tell me this. I have always felt too much.

…

The turtles in the pond that have been decaying since before I got here, watch us from the slimy water lily pads that are not strong enough to hold more than one of them at a time, the weight of their shells and my silence dragging them into the water. They listen to us as we pretend we’re too grown to make mistakes.

“Turn to the side and stare at the sun,” I instruct. My voice sounds womanly in the warmth of September.

She maneuvers her neck confidently in the direction of the sky, swirls of mousey brown hair covering a mark that may have been from birth right underneath her left earlobe. What once was honey brown in her iris is now a mixture of green and amber.

“Yeah, it still works,” I gleaned, like the child I actually was, elated to show my current love interest a new party trick. The sensuality and innocence of having this knowledge, that eye color changes according to the direction in which you face the light, felt important. Declarative. I wanted to reinvent the wheel for her.

She turns back to me, smiling in a way that lets us both know she is older, but I am timeless. Her breathing dishevels her entire body, slowly, as I watch her shoulder lift from the ground and then center itself in the dewy grass.

“Now you. Look at the sun,” she orders, eyeing me up and down, pausing for a moment longer when she reaches my collarbones.

I do it, slowly, and she studies my profile while I stare into the space of her pupils and then the splayed-out bushes to my left.

Pupils, bushes.

Pupils, bushes.

3 seconds in between. This is how you get a woman with a wife to fall in love with you, I thought.

She calculates me calculating her and eventually we fall back onto the crocheted blanket that kisses my skin the way she never would.

…

“Have you read The Price of Salt?” She fingers the spines of my books in my studio apartment, all of them sitting passively on the juvenile bookshelf I bought on sale at IKEA. I really should’ve opted for the mahogany instead of the cheap black plywood, but I was poor and convinced that it was the amount of books you stored on a bookshelf that really mattered visually.

“No, I haven’t. Should I?”

“If you’re going to be a lesbian, you should.”

She smiled under her breath. Something about her having read Patricia Highsmith more than me must have confirmed her queerness in a way I had not yet experienced. I was too new to all of this.

She picked up Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, the corners of the novel weathered from my sweaty thumbprints and tight grip around what I thought held the answers to love and life itself. (This was, of course, untrue, but I didn’t realize that until I forced myself to finish every self-help book on the matter, particularly Robin Norwood’s bestseller, Women Who Love Too Much, published in 1985. It taught me all I needed to know about the love I learned from my mother and father. Women, being burdened, always nurturing, never being nurtured.) I wanted her to ask me how many times I had read the tribute to Virginia Woolf’s work, Mrs. Dalloway. I wanted to read her my essay on the subject for my Intro to the Novel class I was taking. I wanted to be admired for something I loved.

She paced to the front of my twin size bed and collapsed onto the mattress topper with a heavy thump, pressing her back against my windowsill and giving me an empathetic look. It, without a doubt read, I should fuck you, however, I won’t. But not because of me, because of you. The dimming of sky reminded us we only had another hour or so before it was time to close up the windows and drown out the sound of harsh ribbiting frogs that burrowed in the moss surrounding the nearby creak, and created a sheen around her silhouette. She had taken off her brown utility pants 15 minutes earlier in a way that seemed casual and relevant. In a moment of dazed confusion, I forgot the interaction out of pure hunger. I was enamored with her in a way that bent time. I craved her presence in each waking moment, and I was simply happy to see her comfortable — in my bed.

“Is this okay?” she had asked, knowing I wouldn’t object as she peeled the thick canvas material away from her skin. Her way of teasing was anything but subtle. She made this her specialty because to be subtle is to be virtually unknown and you could never say she lived this life anonymously. Nameless.

Her subtlety didn’t mean much to me. I was still going to love her despite our demise.

Sometimes I would try to match her implications, like when I would ask in the coyest manner if her wife would ever find out about the details of that night at my apartment. My subtlety felt so sexy at the time, like a tight black dress that peeked up when you sat down, or when you dropped fresh fruit onto your lap in the summer. Or when you stare at a stranger from across the room until they’re forced to look away. It all ended up being ridiculous, the game of who’s-more-profound-than-who. You only ever end up being the other woman.

In this particularly subtle and obscure moment, I remembered how three weeks ago she drunkenly called me outside some restaurant in Berkeley before meeting up with another partner, a woman she’d been seeing for a little over a year when her wife agreed to an open marriage. They were grabbing a drink, and then who knows, maybe they’d end up back at the partner’s house in Alameda. The partner was ten years older than her and lived in the city, a fact that mirrored our relationship in an uncanny valley sort of way. I was 10 years younger than her, in a studio apartment that was still too expensive for a full-time student. I was young and exciting, but naive and barely 21.

I was buzzed on shitty pink Moscato when she called. My heart stopped when I saw the caller ID and slowed when she told me where she was. It shattered when she told me who she was with. Have you been here before? It’s on Shattuck Street, right where we went to that bookstore. I was the bookstore date, not the dinner with drinks date. I tried to push back the disgusting euphoric image of them at the bar where they would share appetizers, laugh about the details of their day, and then race to her black Lexus to end their night with lustful fucking, faster than the waiter could bring them their check. Who was I to think I could own such a public declaration as that? Who was I to think we would ever romantically leave the confines of these four walls? I couldn’t even get into the bar.

I don’t remember if I said in the heat of my own jealousy, “You’re messed up for calling,” or if the only words that escaped in an effort to remain easy-going, the way women in open marriages find ultra-sexy, were, “Enjoy your night.” I couldn’t remember if I asked how she could have sex with someone in the city but rejected me with passive longing when I reached to hold her hand in public. I couldn’t remember if I asked how she managed to manifest someone to fulfill each level of companionship she craved: the reliable lay, the romantic friendship, and the spouse that approved of one but not the other.

…

I knew her wife’s name and that she was a professor for a local college, but I didn’t know what she taught, when or how she constructed her schedule, and I didn’t know the rules that were attached to their open marriage. I didn’t know if she meal-prepped or what car she drove or if she had a skincare routine that she forgot about on nights where tequila made things hard to remember. I didn’t even know if she liked to drink tequila. I couldn’t tell you the names of her nieces, two of them close to my age, that she took care of like a mother. And I didn’t know for sure, but I certainly assumed that these girls were the reason she despised me being in the picture, tangled in bed with the woman she thought she could work out a marriage with, being all young and in love.

…

Back at my apartment, I stared at her in this gleam made up of dusk and passion while she handed me The Hours with an evasive smile.

“Read me something.”

Finally.

“River” by Leon Bridges played in the background and I felt my cheeks get hot underneath the glow of the fluorescent light I had covered with a sheer shirt above my vanity to give it a vintage sort of haze. I opened to the first page and read each passage I had underlined with black ink until I reached the end of the novel. She watched my lips move over words—unstinting, potent, bereaved, I want a doomed love—like they were sentences sleeping in my bed and I needed to retrieve a glass of water on the other side of the twin mattress. Careful. Not wanting to wake them from dreaming. I watched her watch me and I thought that maybe perfection could exist between all the things we wanted but could not have.

…

During a last-minute trip to Maine, I told a girl I met online from Portland I have four tattoos and showed her the pain it caused me to get each of them stitched into my skin. I flirt with her while contemplating texting you. I try to find an excuse to move on. This all makes me think of the book you recommended to me, the one you bought for me on Shattuck Street. That was our obsession: language. Our elaborate infatuation with words that I tell myself you shared with no one else, but I’m sure you did, because every person you fall in love with is a living, breathing novel.

You’re intrigued (obsessed, maybe) by the monotony of women who enter your life—the married-to-a-man-for-three-years woman who used to be on your softball team. Your friend, Maggie, who you told me was also in a sexless marriage, so maybe you two should just fuck to get over the mutual sadness that comes before divorce. And then me. There’s a tedious sameness to all of us; we like poetry and fiction and alluring conversation that you try to replicate like your favorite authors who I’ve never read. And what am I accomplishing after the rubble of us? What do we have left?

I ask the girl from Portland what scares her most and she says getting a tattoo and all I can think of is that terrible ugly stick and poke of a falcon on your left shoulder and how un-scared you must have been, telling me you already outlived the age you thought you’d die at.

…

A few months after I ended things between us, I visited my parents in Maine. I drank an entire bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon made with organic grapes while my father slept with a flu and my mother suspended consciousness with neon orange earplugs and covers pulled tight over her forehead. I always thought this was an odd way to sleep until I realized how badly I wanted to shut the world out. I mixed the last swallow of red with expensive gin my mother bought for her 50th birthday and stomached down the last 3 ounces of burning alcohol. You texted her. This is what you deserve.

The text message bubble outlines eight miserable words shines bright and blue.

Hope you’re doing okay. Been thinking about you.

I climbed with shaky palms onto the top bunk in the spare room. The bottom was stacked with forgotten boxes of photo albums and bank statements, baby clothes, and broken picture frames my mother told herself she’d restore. When I reached the top, I felt the weight of my decision sink into the sheets next to me. I didn’t have her, but I had the memory of what could have been. Worse than that, I had a text that verged on the line of drunk and sober but in reality, was a measly attempt of unearthing the woman I so desperately wanted.

Hope you’re doing okay. Been thinking about you.

Always.

The room kept spinning and I was too sad to pull the mass of myself up from the hot sheets and before I knew it, I was salivating at the mouth, too tired and drunk to make it to the bathroom. I threw up pink liquid that had made a home in my body and cried when I realized I was the only one who could fix it. I sat in my mistake for a minute and climbed back down the ladder, carefully gathering the putrid smelling blankets and feeling like a five-year-old who couldn’t call her mother for help. With laundry started and freshly brushed teeth, I slept to the sound of the whirring washing machine and my own broken heart.

…

This is how I remember you.

You and I, sitting in some local barbeque spot in downtown Oakland waiting to be served. We had just come from a lesbian acapella event held in a synagogue. I had met your best friend that day (more so, your non-biological brother), and drove to his two-story baby blue house on Telegraph Avenue after my morning shift. I walked up the steps with sweaty palms and stuck-in-my-throat nerves because he had to have known I was more, that I was a light she had been looking for. I heard her laugh from the backyard and the fear dissipated into the dandelions on the edge of the walkway.

The baby blue paint off the side of the house was peeling and although the house looked like it was slowly withering away, succumbing under the weight of gentrification and climate variability, the warmth from the sun radiated against my skin and the smiles of a 30-almost-31-year-old woman and her best-friend-quasi-brother filled me up as I watched them place handmade pom-poms made of multicolored yarn on the backyard fence.

“Oh hello, you.” She thrashed through the dead grass that was ankle-high and hugged me tight with poms in her hands. The adornment she had for me stuck to my espresso-scented shirt and I breathed her in for as long as I could. “You wanna hang up some poms?”

We lined the multicolored mini universes made of thread and fibers along the wooden fence until we ran out and got hungry and realized it was time for lunch. Her brother stayed behind to work in the yard.

“I want to put the garden over here.” He stood close to my frame, pointing to the bare soil lined with a semi-circle of cinder blocks. He wanted someone to tell him that what he was doing was worth it. He trusted that I was that someone even though we hadn’t known each other longer than 30 minutes.

“I think that would look really good,” I replied, smiling in his direction and not the mockup of his nursery. He gave me a solemn look that let me know he understood what this all meant to me. His arms were crossed but his figure was soft against the backdrop of the decaying home. “I’m tired of tending to dead things,” he whispered.

In the cramped clean kitchen, pretending we were not falling harder for one another than we had been before, I was your sous-chef. I whispered that your cilantro wasn’t fine enough, that the onions should go in now, not later. They take time to marry themselves with the garlic. The marriage of spices shouldn’t be rushed, no marriage should.

I said these things with my body. I sat cross-legged on top of the counter where you fed me parsnips, told me I smelled like jasmine underneath the redolence of hard work. And then you introduced me as a ‘friend’ to your brother’s roommate when she walked in the kitchen and witnessed the scene. Your brother’s roommate made her own fruit leather. She bragged about it, the organic quality of the materials, and I knew there had to be a part of you, the woman I was stuck loving, that suspected we were all meant to be in this kitchen eating your brother’s roommate’s cherry flavored fruit preserve. You found it charming, and not at all heartbreaking, a moment in time where I knew for sure what you meant when I asked you if you remembered calling me a ‘friend’.

“All I remember,” you said, “is cooking tacos.”

…

Does anyone know what Fate is? Because sometimes I feel like it’s a knife, and sometimes I feel like it’s a spoon, and I can’t get myself to believe if it’s the sharp death of someone never admitting my worth, or the soft semblance of my admiration for all that they are. If it’s musings from Cheryl Strayed in Tiny Beautiful Things or the long-forgotten letters to your Aunt Lori, an intertwining of work at the hands of other women.

I wonder if I’m allowed, sometimes, to be disappointed by Fate. To regret its passage through my life the way I regret leaving bread in the oven for too long. If the byproduct of Her is my mistakes, something I can alter with time and practice, or if it’s something that leaves me empty for years to come, bringing up memories of infidelity that had nothing to do with me. Of youth and death that had everything to do with me.

I want to have seven soulmates before I die. I may have already met one. And it’s not because of the wife, or the almost-11-year-old age difference, or the inability to stop loving her. It is none of the things we want it to be. It’s only the thing itself in all its glory.

The turtles in the pond have been decaying since I got here.

They are surrounded by memories of cleaner waters, missing loved ones, and wishing for a change in the seasons that may or may not come.