I have a crush on an old version of myself, and a crush on an old version of my lover, and somewhere in my mind, we keep running into the old versions of ourselves—on the street, in coffee shops—and there, we fall in love with the beginning again. My lover thinks this is insane.

"We're happy now," he says, while we're grocery shopping, and he's studying the label on a jar of fancy olives. Off of my look, he says, "We are!" He hates having to convince me.

"Where did the magic go," I say, in bed at night, after we've stretched and yawned, turned our backs to each other, flipped open our books and magazines.

"Do you mean where did the fucking go?" he asks, because he likes calling things by their names. "We still do! It's not gone!"

Me, I'm into abstraction, and I say, "Who knows what I'm looking for! I'm just nostalgic for the past." 

My lover is not; he views the past as long-gone, as a time when the future between us was fraught and uncertain, a plank hovering above dark water. I think that uncertainty was the foundation for a skittish kind of arousal, as opposed to the arousal I feel now, as familiar to me as my own name.

"You want magic," my lover says, closing his eyes. Every time he opens them, he pretends to be relieved to see me. "Poof!," he says. "You're still here, and so am I! Magic!"

And maybe he's right, and this is a different kind of sorcery—that someone could see me naked, and then want to see me again, the next day, clothed. (And the next day, and the next day after that). Maybe I'm a witch or a vampire, skilled in the dark arts. Maybe I'm a wolf dressed as a grandmother or a girl lost in the forest, surprised and fearful, to have found herself somewhere new.

.

Amy Silverberg lives in L.A., where she teaches and does stand-up. She has fiction in a number of places, including Split Lip, Cheap Pop, Tri-Quarterly, and the current volume of BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES.





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