Michael Sanborn waited.

He waited across the street from a three story, crumbling relic of a fraternity house in Villanova, Pennsylvania, seated on the driver’s side of his father’s Audi. It was late, well after midnight, and he waited first for a few minutes, and then, when it was clear Jerome would not be leaving the party shortly, he waited for nearly an hour. For that hour, Michael watched the house intently, studying the happenings of the party. It was, he was confident, no different than any college party, and the hour dragged by slowly despite the constant activity across the street. It was, Michael thought at one point, like most hours of life: the world seemed to be full of activity and movement, but in actuality, very little was happening at all.

First, Michael watched as a group of young men, shrouded in darkness and visible only by the glowing of their cigarettes, came outside once, twice, and finally a third time. Their numbers grew from three to six and shrunk back to three. They huddled closely together on the expansive front porch, for in the early hours of the morning, the night had turned bitterly cold.

After a while, no one came outside and, with the first floor windows boarded up, Michael turned his attention elsewhere. On the second floor of the house, a light, separate from the other windows, turned on and off, again, and again, until finally Michael lost track of how many times it turned and failed to notice the difference between light and dark. Behind the diaphanous bathroom curtain, Michael counted four women come and go- two plump, one wearing a green sweater and one in a pink tank top; one plainly fat in all black; and one starkly skinny girl in white wearing a pink thong who stayed on the toilet far longer than the others. He also counted two men, but failed to notice their attire.

Sometime around two fifteen, a large group of girls, clad mostly in mini-skirts and tank tops despite the cold, clamored loudly outside, laughing, and walked past the park where Michael still waited. They drew his attention from the bathroom; he could hear them laughing because he was smoking a joint and the window was rolled down. After one of the girls, the tallest, made a scene about breaking a heal- she actually went so far as to sit, spread eagle in her mini-skirt, in the middle of the road, the girls disappeared down the road. They reappeared a ways down, in the ephemeral glow of a street light, but then, once more and finally, they were gone. The porch was empty, and the bathroom dark. With the party seeming to wind down, Michael turned his attention to the joint he had rolled while waiting. The smoke was acrid on his throat, but strangely commodious to his psyche, and as he felt himself drifting lightly away from the party, he closed his eyes.

He did not sleep. Or, Michael did not think he slept. He dreamt for sometime, however. In his dream it was summer. He was standing, in shorts and a t-shirt, amongst an oak grove on the banks of a languid river. It was raining, the water brown and dimpled, and Michael found himself thoroughly relaxed in the humid heat. He watched the river twist and turn, and tried to find in the recesses of his mind where exactly he was. He knew the place- he was sure he had been there before- but he could not place it amongst the rivers and oak groves of his memory. Perhaps he had only visited in another dream; perhaps he had simply not visited this river yet and knew it as a prescient state.

Eventually, Michael began to notice the group of people around him. Their faces came into focus and he was overjoyed to find that the three women of his life were there. He was only twenty (although in the dream he felt much older), but he was sure these would be the three women of his life. They were not alone, there were other faces amongst the crowd of people, but Michael did not know any of them and instead stayed focused on the three women. Amanda was the first one he recognized. She was tall, taller than he, and from afar she appeared to be red haired with an egg shaped head. In bed, though, her hair was more golden rod; it reminded him of iron ore. She cradled the stem of a wine glass in her right hand and stood, barefoot, in a slight puddle.

Martha was closer to Michael, standing at the very edge of the river. He feared that a slight bump might send her tumbling into the water. It would only take a slight push for Martha was a slight woman, compact and shy. As he knew her, she had black hair but was naturally a blonde. She had close set blue eyes and a pronounced chin that she hated. It was, she once told Michael in the bedroom, too masculine. Martha and Amanda had never met, yet here they were, together in one place, despite his best efforts over the course of two years to keep them separate.

The third woman of Michael’s life stood next to him and, he noticed belatedly, held his hand. She was foreign but familiar. This made sense: he had not met her except for in dreams, and in them, something about her was always different. Some things would stay the same, of course. She was always short, not quite stocky, with wide hips and broad shoulders and a small chest. Her feet were always bare, and her calves exposed beneath a pair of rolled up jeans. Today, however, she was a curly brunette with green eyes. The last time they had met (it had been the month before, and they were alone on the steps of a Japanese palace somewhere in the snow) she had been a straight haired blonde with devastating, terrifyingly dark brown eyes.

She was both known and unknown. She’d told him about herself: she liked to write and dreamt of living in a shack on the beach, somewhere in the Mediterranean, writing all day, drinking and dancing on the beach at night. If that did not work out (and really, could it work out anywhere but in a boy’s dreams?), she wanted to teach, perhaps high school. In her youth, she had lost a tooth riding a horse and had been a gymnast. She would fill out her hips in old age, like her mother. She did not smoke and she never would. Her favorite writer was Gabriel Garcia Marquez; Love in the Time of Cholera had changed her life and made her want to write.

Perhaps these traits were not all that surprising, as she shared many of them with Michael. But still, they were undeniably hers. Michael had never been a gymnast, and he‘d never laid eyes on a live horse. He wrote, and read, but had he ever much cared for Garcia Marquez (although he did not meet her until reading Eyes Like A Blue Dog). She was partly an extension of him and partly suffused from other, lesser women Michael had known and not quite loved. Despite her appearances in his dreams, despite her phantom like-state of being, he never doubted her existence. She was real and he looked for her, without ever realizing he was looking, everywhere he went. Her name, he had surmised, was Sarah.

Michael opened his eyes to the sound of a knock at the opposite window and the scent of marijuana, fragrant and earthy, still lingering (it was, in fact, this scent that helped him differentiate between dream and non-dream, for in his dreams, Michael was blessed with every sense but that of scent). His head felt heavy, as if inhabited by a mist on top of water in the morning. He looked, belatedly, to who was knocking at his window. Jerome stood outside the car, his arms crossed at his chest, his breath visible against the night. Michael reached across and opened the door, letting his friend into the car. The act of opening the door set off a bright light on the dash board, and Michael shielded his eyes.

Jerome was wearing a red and green Christmas sweater embroidered in dancing reindeer. Michael despised him for being insouciant enough to wear such a heinous shirt and still look calm and confident: he was tall and relaxed, with well built shoulders and a round jaw that gave him a jovial, comedic air. His cheeks were red with cold and he wore a grey stocking hat. He glanced quickly to Michael, but did not close the door.

“Did you smoke?” he asked. He sounded agitated and his voice was hoarse.

Michael nodded.

Jerome closed the door. “Your eyes look like shit,” he said.

“I’ll be fine. I’ve got some drops in here somewhere.”

“You have any pot left?” Jerome asked, rubbing his hands together in front of the heating vent.

“Nope,” Michael responded. He turned on an overhead light and looked in the rearview mirror. His eyes, normally blue, were a deep crimson. “Fuck,” he said. He rummaged through spare CD’s in the center console- his dad actually listened to David Sanborn?- and already used, crusted tissues. Still thinking of Sarah, he did not find any eye drops. He fumbled with the gear shift, turned off the light, and finally pulled away from the house.

Jerome turned up the radio- Frampton on MGK, a guitar solo- and the two friends did not talk until they turned onto US-30. It was nearly three, and the road was empty. Flashing red lights stretched away from them in the darkness, dotting the road all the way to the horizon. The passed quietly through Villanova, first the football stadium, then old stone buildings and a hillside graveyard. Beyond the campus, a convenience store was open, a lone car in the parking lot.

Michael let his mind, still pleasantly hazy, drift. He found himself driving without thinking about driving, without consciousness; at a point it felt like flying. He thought first of Amanda. They had made love earlier that evening, on her couch, and despite the routine of it (they had made love, had sex, fucked, all of it, hundreds of times), something about this time had been exhilarating. It was unusual. Sex with them had long ago lost it’s romance, the newness of fresh love no longer enthralling their bodies. They were so used to one another, to their curves and edges, to their weak spots and imperfections (he could never go on top; her breasts were slightly uneven and she had a birthmark on her left butt cheek) that sex had become like breathing: routine, reactionary, and somehow entirely necessary. The whole sensation of being entirely invested in her body, of wanting to touch all of it again and again, as if he might never get another chance, unnerved Michael because he could not quite guess at what it was that aroused him so much.

She still held something over him, after nearly five years.

Had it really been that long, he wondered, feeling middle aged? Yes, it had. He had been a junior, she a year younger. It seemed to him that she had not changed once in all those years. If anything, she had become more naïve to the workings of the world, reverting to what Michael believed to be a youthful fascination with religion. She attended church again, nearly every Sunday, yet she still wanted to be a doctor, somehow maintaining that God only enhanced her belief in science, in its absoluteness. To Michael, who hoped to be a writer, God and science were diametric opposites. But perhaps they were also one in the same, he found himself currently thinking (maybe, in her childish wisdom, she was right?). For God and science were, Michael believed, outside the realm of literature. Leave them to the doctors and priests. God and science did not move a narrative forward and therefore did not interest a writer. Humanity and it’s failings moved a story.

Michael turned, somehow out of habit, left at a blinking red light onto the Blue Route, his mind and body light and airy. As he merged onto the barren highway, Michael was roused from his thoughts by his friend.

“Fucking Samantha, man,” Jerome said.

“Huh?” Michael asked, losing God and science to the annals of his memory reserved for broken thoughts- probably, he felt, the most cluttered section of his mind.

“Sam, man. She was being such a bitch tonight. That’s mostly what took me so long to leave.”

“That sucks man, I‘m sorry.”

“Yeah, it’s just like, she doesn’t get things, you know? She gets drunk and she has no idea how to control her emotions and gets pissed at me for the stupidest shit. Like tonight. She shows up and I’m playing pong with Maura. She knows we’re friends. And bro, you know Maura is like my sister. I couldn’t even think of hooking up with her. Everyone knows that. But Sam gets pissed anyways. Which is so fucking stupid, because we’re not together. And she just made it worse because she’s a bitch and denied being pissed the whole damn night until the very end. Which, of course, is what she always does, and it’s stupid because I always know she’s mad anyways. I can‘t describe how fucking stupid this was. I knew she was mad the whole damn night.”

Jerome drew out the last three words, his voice rising. He looked at Michael, who merely nodded knowingly. Jerome and Sam had been fighting since they first met. Had it really been five years for them, too? Michael wondered. When did five years worth of fights and parties and late night drives sneak past them?

“She’s just so fucking high school, man,” Jerome continued. “She’s a high school girl and we have a high school relationship. I have no idea what the hell is there anymore. We’re just going through the fucking motions. We don’t even like each other anymore.” He paused, and looked at Michael, who kept his eyes straight ahead. “I really don’t think I’d hang out with her at school. She’s like the antithesis of the kind of girl I’m looking for. I’m just done man. I fucking hate her.”

“No, you don’t,” Michael said, without much need- they both knew it already.

“Yes, I do. I’m just done. You guys don’t know. Everyone thinks Sam is this great, hardworking girl who’s really selfless and kind. But it’s all fucking bullshit. Sam is the nicest girl in the world if you don’t know her, but if you love her, she doesn’t give a fuck about you. You’re worthless. She takes you for granted.”

“I’m sure she doesn’t.”

“No, trust me, she does. Sam needs to get fucked over man, I’m telling you. The best thing I could do for her is to say fuck her and just cut her out. She needs to see that treating people who care about her like shit isn’t ok, that she can actually lose them. She’s had everything fucking handed to her, and she just assumes it’ll always be there, but it won’t.”

“What are you going to do then?”

“I don’t know man, I don’t know.” Jerome sighed, seeming to exhale five years of grievances. He leaned his head against the window and closed his eyes.

Although Michael felt badly for his friend, he needed the silence. He wondered if he were ever this harsh on Amanda. He hoped not. He kept running things through his mind: Amanda, Martha, Sarah, Jerome, and Samantha. Love. The problem with love, he found himself thinking, was not only the ability for comparisons, but the possibility of its confusions. How does one differentiate between love and non-love, or between love, non-love, or lust? What if Jerome and he had spent five years fighting all for non-love, or worse, lust? How would they even know?

Michael thought once again of the three women of his life. He questioned, for the first time, giving them such a definitive title. It sounded, he worried, rather stupid and immature. For what if he was wrong about loving them? He had so many more women to meet in his life. There was no telling how many of them might shape him, how many of them he might love. And what if he never found Sarah? She was, after all, a phantom concocted in his sleep and yet he thought about her all the time.

How, he kept asking, would he know if he really loved anyone? Did he love those three women? Amanda he did not doubt. He loved her (he hoped). But Martha? Did he love her? They had met in a history class, something about the Revolutionary War, and for a few weeks they had exchanged surreptitious glances, a flirtation of the eyes. Then one day after class they got coffee together and, after coffee turned to dinner, they spent the night at her loft and skipped their classes the next day. That afternoon and night, spent exploring the back alleys, bookstores, and music clubs of Philadelphia, had taken on an epic nostalgia for him. It struck him now that their whole relationship, nearly nine months, had been born of a single exploration, and they had spent the entire nine months since trying to recapture the romance and newness of that first night. They had failed terribly. Despite that, he could not shake the memory, how as the hours passed he had seemed more and more awake, how they had danced seemingly for years in the smoky basement of a jazz club, the way she held her cigarettes at the diner, and the way it all ended, the two of them watching the sunrise over the skyline, arm in arm on the top step of the art museum. Could love be born, and survive, from a single memory?

Certainly it must be possible. They had little else between them. She was a fine woman, of course, an anthropology major deeply concerned with the plight of Africa. But while she was an extrovert and an idealist at heart, devoted to saving the world (or at least the parts of it she could save) he was far more selfish and introverted. His concerns, and mostly his alone, kept him awake at night. She was a far better person than he. After Katrina, she had rounded up a group of friends and spent her winter break building houses (although Matthew had trouble imagining someone as slight as Martha ever wielding a hammer) and trying, in her mind, to save a city. He did not know her then, but if he had, he would not have gone to New Orleans with her. For one, he had given up on saving anything, but most importantly, it would have meant missing his time with Amanda. Without trying, he had compared the two of them again. He was always comparing the two of them, even in hindsight, weighing them against each other.

They were almost home. They passed signs for Springfield and Route 1. Sitting next to Michael, Jerome still rested his head against the window, his eyes closed. Michael thought that perhaps he was asleep. He needed to ask him something, a question that had been lingering, nagging him.

“Why did you fall in love with her?” he asked.

Jerome talked without opening his eyes. “Sam?” he said.

Michael nodded, and Jerome listened to the pause before speaking again.

“I don’t know,” he finally said. “Have I told you how we met?”

“I don’t think so.”

Jerome opened his eyes and sat forward. “At the sophomore dance. She was there with Greg. I’d seen her all night and I kept thinking to myself, ‘who is that girl?’ I thought she was beautiful and she was laughing all night long. Outside, before leaving, she just came right up to me and introduced herself. We talked. She was really funny, and smart. She was so smart. Anyways, I asked her if she wanted to come over to Mark’s house, but she couldn’t. Her mom was picking her up. She called me later though and we talked for nearly three hours.”

Michael smiled.

Jerome continued. “We were friends for a few months, and then one night in June at a party we kissed. I took her out to dinner the next week and that’s kinda been it.”

He paused. Michael could hear the engine working to climb a hill, and the winter air rushing over the windshield. They crested the slight hill and turned around a bend. The highway opened up in front of them, descending and curving gently to the north, elevated over the tree tops. Somewhere in the blackness surrounding the highway were there homes, their lives, and their women.

“You know what I can’t get over though man?” Jerome said, turning to face Michael.

“What?”

“I don’t know exactly why we fell in love. I can never pinpoint what it was, or when I knew. I mean, I guess it’s just because we saw each other everyday. She was always there. We fell in love because we could talk to one another and we went to the same high school.”

“I’m sure it was more than that,” Michael said.

“No. I don’t think so. That’s why. We were just both always there. That’s what I can’t get over. If I went to any other high school in the world, I wouldn’t love her. I’d probably be in love with someone else. Fuck, I definitely would have fallen in love with someone else.”

Michael laughed. Over the years Jerome had claimed to love, or almost love, many women. Sam was the only one he always came back to.

“Do you know how Amanda and I met?” Michael asked his friend.

“Not really.”

“I got suckered punched in the ear and shattered my ear drum. Amanda walked me to the nurses’ office because she happened to be sitting at the same lunch table. She sat with me the whole afternoon and came over two days later to make sure I was ok,” he said, both of them laughing. “Now, obviously, I could have met her under better circumstances. But still. If I don’t get punched, do I ever fall in love with her? Or is she just the cute girl who sat at the end of my lunch table?”

The question was met with a shrug.

“I mean, who knows. Maybe I would have met her some other way.”

“Well do you think it was fate?” Jerome asked.

“I don’t know.”

Michael looked at his friend and threw his hands in the air for a moment, releasing the steering wheel.

“I don’t know,” he said again. “I’m just saying a lot of things had to happen for me to fall in love with her. Just as a lot of things had to happen for you to meet Sam.”

Jerome nodded and looked out the window. Michael turned on his blinker and shifted lanes, turning off the highway, slowing down the ramp. He was thinking of fate. Had it been fate that had brought his parents together, fate that had brought them out of Philadelphia? What if they had stayed in Philly? Had it been fate that had brought he and Amanda together, fate that had placed him in the same history class as Martha? Or was it something else?

The two friends sat in silence, driving past a darkened Wawa, and through the projects near 320. Suddenly, Michael was struck by something. What women had fate denied him a chance to love? He thought of his dream, how he had stood by the river holding hands with Sarah, a woman he had never met yet still loved. Why had he held her hand and not Martha’s or Amanda’s? Why not the women he knew?

Michael found himself thinking about all the women he might never love. Or, more precisely, all the women he might love but never meet. It distressed him, to think of the vast size of the world, the fallibility of fate, and all the women he would never meet or love or, perhaps worst of all, never have a chance to love. That struck him as cruelest of all; the world was simply too big, and life was not nearly long enough.

He turned onto Jerome’s street, driving beneath the outstretched branches of a weeping willow tree. He cut his lights and slid silently up to Jerome’s house, putting the car in park. The two friends looked at one another for a moment, a shared sadness. Then Jerome smiled and extended his hand.

“Thanks a lot for the ride, man. I really appreciate it.”

“No problem,” Michael said. “Someone has to drive your drunk ass home.”

Jerome laughed. “I’m not that drunk, you fucking stoner.”

Michael smiled. “Good luck with Sam. I’m sure you’ll figure it out.”

“We always do. Relatively speaking. I’ll call you tomorrow, ok? Maybe we can find a place to shoot some hoops.”

“Not likely.”

“No, not likely.” Jerome climbed out of the car and leaned his head down. “Later.”

“Later,” Michael called as the door shut. Michael sat for a few seconds before stepping on the gas and pulling away, turning his lights back on. He drove back the way he came, out of the neighborhood, and onto 320. He drove for sometime through town, past his old high school and past the golf course where he had caddied as a kid. He drove past Amanda’s house and stopped down the street, letting the car run. He knew the moment he had fallen in love with her. It had been May and they were at the beach. It was a cold, windy day- the boardwalk had been almost deserted. They walked, hand in hand, down to the very end of it, where the boards narrowed and the shops and restaurants gave way to condos and houses. On their first date, two months earlier, he had told her that as a child he had been fascinated by shipwrecks.

She wanted to show him a shipwreck.

So, they sat on a bench, battered by the wind, tangled together for warmth, looking out across the pale white sand to the grey water, searching in vain for a shipwreck. After nearly an hour, he finally convinced her to give up. The ocean would not reveal its secrets, but it did not matter. He loved her.

Waiting once more in the darkness, Michael pulled his cell phone out of his pocket. It was three-fifteen. He found Amanda’s number and called her. The phone rang once, twice, and on the third ring went to her voice mail. He tried twice more. She didn’t answer, and Michael closed his phone. She wouldn’t be waking up, but he sat for a minute longer, waiting for something. Finally, he pulled away.

He drove once more through town, past all the landmarks of his life. He passed all his friend’s houses (some of them long since moved away, and one of them dead), and all three of his schools. He passed the park where he had run cross country and the baseball diamond where he had played little league. He passed the house of the first girl he kissed, and the house where he had attended his first keg party. Lastly, he drove around his neighborhood, down to the woods where he used to smoke pot in high school, and finally into his own driveway. He cut the lights and turned off the radio. He unbuckled and grabbed a bag of pot from the center console. Before turning the car off, he looked at his dashboard. The clock read three thirty-seven. The entire drive had not even taken twenty minutes.