In January, heartbreak came in an off-white envelope with a red wax seal, addressed from you to me. You chose the perfect font; it was slanted, looping, elegant. My three-year-old daughter, Alessia, stacked her blocks and sat cross-legged on the tumbling mat I had set up in the living room, and the TV was on. Elmo moved his hands emphatically, and Alessia looked on with eagerness. Alessia, my sweet love with her sweet delight. In front of the door, holding that invitation, I couldn’t summon my own delight. Gardenia Canales and Sarah Moore invite you to celebrate their wedding. You were marrying a woman. I wouldn’t have guessed that. I’d thought that, in the end, you would end up with a man. Love really does triumph over all. You’d done it: you’d found your person against all odds. And I was not her.

I was your ex-best friend from college, not your person or your twin flame or your soulmate. I had known this fact for five years, but the invitation I held in my hands was the final declaration. It was a closing door, a grand finale, an invitation to a funeral. Never again would I wake up in bed and find you on the other side of it, saliva crusted at the corner of your mouth and your face so smooth and peaceful. No more dark curly hair in the wind on the beach, no more rolling down a hill in the night like children set free, no more giggles over pinkish drinks, no more cakes with our names on it. We would not be old ladies together. We would not sit in rocking chairs on a porch and watch the sunset. You would do that with someone else. And, lucky me, I was invited to celebrate it.

I was not a hoarder, but there were things I kept. I had the cardboard box you’d stuffed our memories into, collecting dust on the top shelf in my closet. I used a stool to get it, then brought it to the living room and sat down like a pretzel next to my daughter. In the box, I found those letters I wrote you. You’d given them all back. Well, not all—you’d given twelve of them back. Where were the rest? Did you keep them, or had you thrown them away?

The letters were wrapped up in twine and weathered, as if they’d been read and re-read, over and over. Some of them seemed to have been dipped in water or carried through rain. I pulled at the string and watched everything unravel. It can be satisfying, watching a solid object come undone. Alessia crawled closer and hoisted herself up on the sturdy edge of the box. She furrowed her brows, as if trying to make sense of the miscellaneous objects. A pink raincoat, a bunch of movie ticket stubs, an orange picnic blanket, a bumblebee charm for a bracelet, a red mug with a white G on it, a bottle-opener, a folded-up tapestry of Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss.

You had crossed my mind at times, but not always, and by that I mean not every day. I could go through chunks of time without wondering how you were. It had been years, after all. But now I had that damn invitation. What it meant was that I could see you again. I could ignore the invitation, of course, but I was too curious. I thought, Who are you now? I held one of the old, weathered envelopes from the box and recognized the rare opportunity to commune with a version of myself from the past. What had she been thinking about? What had she obsessed over? Had I actually been the person I remembered?

Often I spoke to Alessia as if she could respond with the wisdom of someone much older. I’d read in a Stanford study that this was the thing to do with children, to increase their cognitive abilities. So I asked her now, “What do you think, sweet girl? Should I read these?”

She had my same honey-brown complexion, with her father’s wide hazel eyes and spiraling curls. She said, “Mommy, mom-my, mama,” playing with the word and taking it apart with her bubbling voice.

“I know I don’t need to go to this wedding, but I want to. Is that weird? I’ll feel like a failure if I don’t go. And I’ll feel like a failure if I don’t bring a date.”

Alessia smiled, and I shook my head. “I know what you’re thinking. But I can’t bring your dad either. It has to be real, or I’ll still feel like I failed.”

When I unfolded the tapestry halfway and pinched the yellow and gold microfiber cloth between my fingers, it all came back to me like a wave of water—or, more accurately, a wave of nausea.

It was freshman year.

By the time I found our dorm room, you had already made us a home, Gardenia. You’d hung fairy lights from the ceiling, and you’d hung a tapestry on the wall between our beds: a rendering of Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss. A faceless man with coarse dark hair embraced a woman, kissed her face lovingly, held her chin with his long fingers. They were surrounded by gold, sparkles, contrasting patterns, bright flowers. Their love had brought them to their knees, and they were peaceful and impassioned. The tapestry spanned nearly the entire wall; it would live behind our heads, behind the frames of our beds, hovering over us, our patron saints of love.

Your bed sheets were mauve, and you had an excessive number of pillows. It reminded me of how I’d slept as a young girl, encircled with three stuffed animals half the size of my body because I couldn’t stand to be in bed alone—I feared that a monster would reach out from under the bed and tickle my toes, or worse, that I’d reach out beside me and find nothing in the bed but myself. By now, though, I’d abandoned the stuffed animals and didn’t use very many pillows. The bare minimum would do—one or two soft ones that would flatten over time until they were useless; that was all I needed.

I wore a black button-down with white flowers on it. You were dressed in dark-wash cuffed jeans and an oversized T-shirt with a line drawing of a baby tortoise tucked away in its shell. In a tiny font across your breasts were the words just a girl that loves tortoises.

At first, our mothers were there with us. Yours helped you position little wooden animals on flat surfaces: a tiny giraffe on the window sill, a tiny frog on your desk, a tiny hippopotamus next to one leg of your bed. Your father had been there earlier on, but had left for work. My mother helped me make my bed and unpack my bags and put my clothes in drawers. She left without too much sentiment—she loved with quiet strength. Your mother hugged you and kissed you and cried. You cried too. I tried pretending there was a barrier between my side and yours and that I couldn’t hear or see past it. I didn’t want to intrude.

We had exchanged hellos and short introductions while our mothers were there, but it wasn’t until they were gone that we really started to talk. We talked for hours, from evening to night. You told me that you had wanted to come to Weiland College since you were a kid. You’d visited it on a school trip in elementary school and decided that you were destined for the place. You were studying psychology, not because you really “believed in shrinking heads,” but because you wanted to be a social worker.

I’d come to Weiland for their selective writing program, which had produced a handful of writers I admired, people I wanted to emulate. A writer?! This thrilled you for some reason. You asked me what I wrote about, and I told you that I usually wrote about love. You said you thought that was so romantic, and you asked if you could read something one day. I said I’d think about it, an answer you accepted with joy.

Your joy relaxed me, Gardenia. In truth, I was afraid to be away from home in a bed I didn’t know. On the ride to Weiland, I’d told myself that I probably wouldn’t sleep that night—the room was sure to feel too alien and unwelcoming. I’d believed that one simply couldn’t make a room into a home in one day. But I was wrong.

We ordered pizza for dinner, sat on our parallel beds, and spilled our hearts out while stuffing our faces. You told me about the boy back home that you thought you might love (Julio), and I told you about my boyfriend back home (Dante), with whom I was in an open relationship. You thought I was insane. When you love someone, you said, you don’t share them. You assured me that you would never share your boy, and that you’d drop him if he ever suggested it.

Then you told me about your mom, and about how dramatic you thought she was. You thought everyone in your family was dramatic. You all laughed hard and loved hard, and cried when things hurt, and yelled when you were angry. I told you about my family. We did love hard, yes, but while I loved with quite a bit of drama, my family did not. My mother certainly did not. She affirmed with actions, not words. My mother said I love you by washing dishes, by helping me with a difficult math problem, by sitting next to me while I was sad and not making me talk about it.

And what about these little funny animals? I had asked. You grinned and said you liked leaving evidence of yourself in unexpected places for people to discover. For you yourself to discover again later. The wooden animals were signs that you’d been there.

It was rare for me to warm to a new person so quickly, and when I tried to think of why I warmed to you, it was hard to pin down. Why were you so bright and shining when most other people were dull? At times, when you leaned forward, lowered your voice, and smiled as you told me something new, it felt as if we were sharing a secret. When you said my name, it was with familiarity and affection, as if we knew each other already. I felt special. Chosen. My best friend at home was Ella, and she was the one person in the world I could talk to about anything, but that had taken time. I could be social, but this took great energy, and only came naturally with people I already knew. Fast friends were hardly usual for me. Yet all those little things you did suggested we’d known each other before that day. When I spoke, you were intensely interested; when I made a joke, you understood it. When you spoke, you said things that a person wouldn’t normally say to someone they had just met.

You told me you wished you could be closer to your father, but that he wanted to be respected, not relatable. You didn’t like socks because they were like having a second skin on your skin, and you hated peeling them off after a long day and seeing imprints on your ankles and feet, but you wore them anyway. You felt like you took up too much space. You hated how your thighs spread and expanded when you sat down. You wanted to be smaller.

I told you that I was disgusted by the dusting of hair under my navel and that I compulsively shaved it, even though shaving it irritated my skin, which I had never revealed to anyone before. I told you that I wished my mother talked to me about her emotions so that I could understand them, that I looked at her and saw a safe—a metal box with undisclosed contents that I desperately wanted to discover. I even told you that I thought I was meager, that I took up too little space and wished to disturb my environment and make people realize I was there.

When it was night, I asked you about The Kiss tapestry. Initially, you’d found a print of the painting in a bin filled with art and records on a street corner in The Bronx. It was a small print, the size of your hand, and the man gave you a good deal: two for five dollars. You hadn’t known the artist, but you’d seen it somewhere before. You asked me if I’d ever seen a painting that had nothing to do with me but felt, for one reason or another, that the person depicted in it was me and no one else. No. This had never happened to me before. You turned toward The Kiss and said, “I think she’s me.” When I asked why, you shrugged and asked what piece of art I’d cover a wall with if I had to pick one.

I decided on The Starry Night. When you asked me why, I told you it was the truest depiction of the night sky I had ever seen. You shook your head in disbelief. “There’s no way you see the sky that way.” I responded, “And you don’t look like the girl in that painting.” As soon as I said it, I wanted to take it back. I’d meant it in a cheeky way, but it could have come across as a challenge, an offense. I didn’t want to offend you; I liked you so much already. Your joy melted the sharp corners of the room, smoothed them out, spread warmth around the two of us. The readiness with which you shared yourself felt like a present.

But you weren’t offended. “Fine,” you said. “I can believe the night sky looks something like that to you.” After a pause, you added, “So maybe the girl in the painting isn’t me. But I wanna be her so bad. Do you see how he’s kissing her? I like her because she’s loved.”

I turned to you but couldn’t face you head on. It was getting late. Swaddled in your comforter, you sat with your head poking out and your back curved. You rocked back and forth almost imperceptibly, then stopped when you noticed me looking.

“I don’t know if this is weird, but can I sit on your bed with you?” you asked.

It was weird. I thought it was weird. I wasn’t used to sharing my space in that way, especially not with a stranger. But you weren’t a stranger. I decided that we must have known each other before, that we’d met in some other place, some other life. Perhaps we had once built a home together—a home in a room like this one, or a home somewhere else.

“Okay,” I said.

You crossed the room and sat beside me, starting to rock again. It was a tiny movement, but I could feel it.

“I’m nervous,” you admitted. “Not to be a baby, but before today my parents took care of me. They made sure I was okay. Who’s gonna make sure I’m good now?”

“Me,” I said without thinking. “I’ll make sure you’re okay. Will you make sure I’m okay?”

You relaxed, and the fairy lights illuminated your smile in the dark. “Duh,” you said.

Not long after that, when we were both tucked into our respective beds, you said, “You should write me letters.”

“Letters?” I asked.

“Yeah, letters. Since you’re a writer. I’ve always wanted someone to write me a letter. A boy, except I don’t think boys are that…what’s the best word…thoughtful? You’d write good ones.”

“Always is a beautiful word,” I said, turning on my side. Always. All ways. Al-ways. I thought of perpetuity, infinity. I thought of every day and all the time. Had you come out of your mother’s womb wanting someone to write you a letter? Was there a letter-shaped ache in your belly? When you were a girl, had you wished for the day you’d receive a letter?

“But I can’t write you letters,” I said. “We live in the same room.”

“Uh, you can. Write them for me and leave them on my desk.”

“What would I write?”

“Anything. Your thoughts?”

I considered it, and I decided, yes, I would do that. I would write you letters. You had always wanted it, and who was I to deny your everlasting wish, when I could fulfill it with ease?

Hearing a knock on the door, I scooped up Alessia and answered it.

A man stood there, holding a loaf of homemade sourdough bread. He was maybe a few years older than me, in his early thirties. For the past four years, I had lived in a brownstone that my grandfather owned. He let me stay in the apartment on the top floor and rented the bottom floor to an elderly woman named Julie. I didn’t recognize the man at the door, but I recognized the bread and the floral ceramic dish it rested on.

“Julie?” I asked.

“Yes… Sorry to bother you. I’m her son. She sent me up here to bring you this. I can put it on the table for you. I see you have your hands full.”

I couldn’t recall ever seeing him before. “Thanks,” I said.

I moved aside, and he stepped in. It wasn’t a large apartment, but there were two bedrooms; it was enough for me and Alessia. He placed the bread on the dining-room table and observed the place while trying to act as if he wasn’t taking it all in. He had Nordic features, rectangular glasses, fine brown hair. I wasn’t sure if I found him attractive, but I didn’t find him unattractive. Could he be my person? My wedding date? Could he save me from the embarrassment of being the one who was still alone?

“I haven’t seen you before,” I said.

“I know. But you’ll see me more. Not you—I don’t mean to be strange. People around here. I’ll be back to help my mother, is what I mean.”

“Of course,” I said, putting him out of his misery. He was awkward, but there was something about him I thought I could warm to. His face flushed with color as he tried to find his words. He was vulnerable. You can find something to love in anyone if you try. I couldn’t remember who had told me that.

“Cute kid,” he said.

Alessia was tugging at one of my boho braids. As I walked him to the door, I tried to discourage her by turning my head in the opposite direction, but she persisted.

Before he left, he said, “I’m Eric, by the way. Sorry.”

I said, “Nice to meet you. I’m Nia.”

After he was gone, I found myself wondering if I could make any relationship work. I certainly had flaws and pitfalls. My relationship with Alessia’s father had failed. Had that been my fault? I had a sickening sense that something was intrinsically wrong with me. Something that would throw a wrench in any relationship, romantic or otherwise. I stared at the cardboard box on the floor, filled with all its evidence. Was the answer to my loneliness in my past?

ALWAYS BUT NOT FOREVER is a contemporary novel following a young woman named Nia who is grieving the pseudo-romantic friendship she had with Gardenia, her college roommate. After receiving an invitation to Gardenia’s wedding, Nia reflects on what they once shared and on the person she was years before. She grapples with the temporary nature of love and of identity itself, viewing herself through the identity-based lenses of mother, daughter, friend, and considering how her identification with each of these titles has shifted over time. She realizes that identity and love are not fixed or perpetually stable, even though it can be comforting to think of them as such. The novel also delves into the ways in which Nia experiences relationships with men and women, as a bisexual woman. She burrows into the corners of herself, and her reflections on her friendship with Gardenia illuminates her understanding of her own sexuality and relationship with intimacy.

Nia stumbles toward closeness with the people she encounters after receiving Gardenia’s wedding invitation. She is desperate to connect with them and potentially find her “person”—someone to replace Gardenia in her mind and heart. She meets Hana, a stoic and curious social anthropologist and photographer, who is intrigued by the way Nia experiences the world; Eric, an awkward but sexually dominant man in her building; Brisbane, an intuitive body painter; and Charlotta, an older literature professor. She also considers the different ways she has loved and been loved by her parents. Following her parents’ divorce, she became close to her mother but estranged from her father. How did her relationships with her parents function as predecessors to the relationships that were to follow?

This is a story about womanhood, compulsory heterosexuality, the different shapes and manifestations of love in our lives, and the necessity of redefining ourselves as we change and grow.