The Seven Year Slip

She always said she loved van Gogh's work, and maybe that was why I loved it as well. And knowing what I knew now, maybe she liked van Gogh's work for other reasons, too. Maybe she liked how he created things while never knowing his own value. Maybe she liked the thought of being imperfect, but being loved anyway. Maybe she felt some sort of kinship with a man who, for his entire adult life, warred with his own monsters in his head. Vincent van Gogh's last words were, after his brother comforted him by telling him he would get better from the self-inflicted gunshot wound to the chest, "La tristesse durera toujours."

The sadness will last forever.

It still smelled the same as I remembered. Of old books and weathered leather and crinkly paperbacks with broken spines, romances and adventures and fantasies and travel guides, paperweights to picture books. When she wasn’t traveling, my aunt read. She pored over stories, drowned herself in words. In the summers between our adventures, she’d build a pillow fort and crawl underneath it, lit with fairy lights and lavender-scented candles in mason jars, and we’d read together. Sometimes I spent entire weekends adventuring with Eloise or solving mysteries with Harriet.

“And,” she had said gravely, that summer I turned eight and thought I knew what made this apartment magical, but I did not, “it bends time when you least expect it.”

Like the pages of a book, uniting a prologue with a happy ending, an epilogue with a tragic beginning, two middles, two climaxes, two stories that never quite meet in the world outside.

“One moment you are in the present in the hall”—she pointed toward the front door, as if it was a journey she had lived already, retracing her steps in the map of her memory—“the next you open the door and you slip through time into the past. Seven years.” Then, a little quieter, “It’s always seven years.”

I wished I hated this place that still felt like my aunt could live here. That she could still walk out of her bedroom and laugh at me on the couch and say, Oh, my darling, going to bed already? I still have half a bottle of merlot in the fridge. Get up, the night’s young! I’ll cook you some eggs. Let’s play some cards.

But she was gone, and the apartment remained, along with all of the foolish fake secrets she whispered about it. Besides, if this apartment really was magical, then how come it hadn’t brought me back to my aunt yet, over the hundreds of times I’d come in and out, and in and out, over the last six months?

Why was I still here alone, on this couch, listening to the sounds of a city that kept moving forward, and forward, and forward, while I still mourned somewhere in the past?