We Go Way Back

chapter one

       NOTHING IS LOST, nothing is created, everything is transformed.

Antoine Lavoisier said these words in the 1770's, and although he was referring to chemistry and the law of conservation of mass, as a person not so gifted in mathematics and science, I always interpreted it much more philosophically. Lavoisier's Law was a scientific demonstration of the mutable qualities of everything — chemical compounds, organisms, to a greater scale, people.

People change, that's what I took from the chemist's words. My mother would disagree, she'd say that people don't change, only their motivations, but I am quickly realizing that the French scholar was onto something.

I'm stuck in one of those outer body experiences. I have vacated my body and now float above, ghostly back pressed to the ceiling of this stuffy living room as I look down at the Hollywoodish slowed down scene playing.

There's a wooden table between my body and Will's. Will... William Bennett, my knight in shining armor. The one who mended my broken heart, the one that showed me what true love is, how good it feels to be loved, who shared a life with me. The one who is now kicking me out of the apartment he once said was ours.

It's raining outside. It's not surprising, we live in Seattle and it's December, but the raindrops are hitting the window so harshly that Will's words are lost in the void of my scattered brain. I can feel them tickling my ears as they enter my head, but I can't make sense of them. He's like he's talking in a foreign language. Or I'm underwater.

He looks so mad. His face is all red, veins bulge out on his neck and his forehead, and he's gesticulating like a crazy person. A sudden thought pops up in the midst of the chaos: why is he mad? I was the one that came from a week at my parents' house to find him and his bombshell blonde coworker in bed. But now he's saying that it is my fault that I chose to visit my family instead of spending the holidays with him; that I'm always too busy for him; that he doesn't feel like a priority for me.

I open my mouth to refute every senseless accusation, but nothing comes out. Even if I did speak, I'd go unheard because he's just rambling and shouting. Throwing hands in the air, running them through his hair, sighing and heaving. He's on the verge of becoming the first case of anger-induced anaphylactic shock.

And just like that, Lavoisier's Law finds its way back into my mind — well, my dumbed down version of it does. People change. Will has changed. Or maybe he hasn't, maybe I just didn't see the signs, maybe he was always a shitty boyfriend and person. One thing is for sure: I have changed.

Will and I met when I was eighteen, on my freshman year of college at the University of Washington. Our story was something out of a rom-com movie: he was a guest speaker at the business class that I walked in by mistake. I was late to my actual class, and I ended up going to the wrong classroom. And there he was. Dark hair, greenish-brown eyes, a smile that made my heart stop for a whole second. Needless to say, I didn't make it to my class that day, nor to the following ones because by then, I was having lunch with him at a nearby café.

My teammates thought it was the coolest thing to have a successful, older boyfriend that would pick me up from practice and take me on escapades to the beach, and for a moment there, it really was. For two and a half years it was. We'd go on dates in the best restaurants in town; he surprised me with weekend getaways and little trips; it was fairy tale like.

We moved in together after just eight months of dating because we were already spending every waking moment together. Since his apartment had been a graduation gift from his grandparents, we didn't pay rent. I tried to convince him to let me chip in on bills, but he never let me. I only realize now how I was always at a disadvantage from the get-go: younger, poorer, innocent, and dumb.