Anastasia, or What I Wanted to Keep
Hot summer nights with the windows open and Muse playing loud enough to feel it in your chest. I wanted to preserve the smell of her breath in a jar—for bad times, I told myself. The kind of thought that only makes sense when you’re twenty and someone has quietly dismantled everything you thought you were.
Anastasia had turned my life and everything I believed in completely upside down. When we talked breathlessly about the future, it wasn’t the ordinary kind—not careers, not settling, not becoming the kind of adjusted citizens of a mediocre state we’d decided we were too good to become. Something fiercer than that. We were going to be free. The feeling was real even when the plan wasn’t.
In her presence I became a hungry sponge, needing to absorb everything. Why did she suddenly eat only fruit? Why only black clothing for months on end? On what exact, ruinous day did I turn from her best friend into her biggest fan? I couldn’t answer any of it. I just kept moving toward her.
Ana was an extreme dreamer and an extreme doer simultaneously, which should have been contradictory but in her wasn’t. She had a willpower that could bend almost anything—and running alongside it, a hurricane of self-destruction that stripped her of constraints, fears, and losses. What she became was a pulsing spirit with no anchors. I admired that more than I could explain. I wanted it for myself. I wanted to see the world the way she did. Even if it cost me something.
What started as lake trips and careless flirtations at parties and aimless walks toward the horizon became something toxic. A craving that poisoned my thoughts and took over my days. I turned into a rabid zombie of my own feelings—caught in a loop of deep regret, misplaced love, and questions without answers that wouldn’t stop asking themselves. The light dimmed. I sacrificed myself but didn’t tell the truth. Preached rebellion and collapsed in the wind. Loved her soul and wanted her body.
By the time it burned out, I’d long since lost her to wherever she was going next. Her scent was gone. The words had faded. That feeling—two people bound by nothing except a shared refusal to accept the end—vanished into the dark with a cold laugh. What remained were the scars of another era, mine alone to carry, and one certainty: a girl named Anastasia became the symbol of my will, my freedom, my nerve. I feel like I survived her.