because i may be only eighteen, but it already seems pretty obvious that the world is divided into two groups: the doers and the watchers. the people things happen to and the rest of us, who just sort of plod on with things. the lulus and the allysons.

maybe it's not about looking hot for guys, but about feeling like a place acknowledged you, winked at you, accepted you.

you can't work too much at it, or it feels like work. you have to surrender yourself to the chaos. to the accidents. • i'm supposed to walk in front of a bus and then i'll have a good time?

alone? i think he must mean only. and i'm never alone, not with mom and her color-coded calendar on the fridge, making sure every spare moment of my time is accounted for, making sure every aspect of my life is happily well managed. except when i pause for a second and think about how i feel, at home, at the dinner table with mom and dad talking at me, not to me, at school with a bunch of people who never really became my friends, i understand that even if he didn't mean to, he got it right.

i won't say that you're pretty, because that dog already did. and i won't say you're funny, because you have had me laughing since i met you. i think you're the sort of person who finds money on the ground and waves it in the air and asks if anyone has lost it. i think you cry in movies that aren't even sad because you have a soft heart, though you don't let it show. i think you do things that scare you, and that makes you braver than those adrenaline junkies who bungee-jump off bridges.

except he didn't have a daughter, i say. or you'd be married by now. we are on our sides, facing each other, so close i can feel the warmth radiating off him, so close it's like we are breathing the same air. you be the daughter. tell me that couplet again, he says. green trees against the sky in the spring rain while the sky set off the spring trees in the obscuration. red flowers dot the land in the breeze's chase while the land colored up in red after the kiss. the last word, kiss, hangs in the air. next time i get sick, you can tell that to me. you can be my girl in the mountains. • okay, i say. i'll be your mountain girl and take care of you. he smiles, like it's another joke, another volley in our flirtation, and i smile back, even though i'm not joking. and in return, i will relieve you of the burden of time. he slips my watch onto his lanky wrist, where it doesn't seem quite so much like a prison shackle. for now, time doesn’t exist. it is, what did jacques say... fluid? • fluid, i repeat, like an incantation. because if time can be fluid, then maybe something that is just one day can go on indefinitely.

but now here i am: no money. no place to stay. it should be my worst nightmare. but i don't care. it's funny the things you think you're scared of until they're upon you, and then you're not.

part of me knows one more day won't do anything except postpone the heartbreak. but another part of me believes differently. we are born in one day. we die in one day. we can change in one day. and we can fall in love in one day. anything can happen in just one day.

and for just the tiniest of seconds, i wonder what would happen if i told them the truth. that school is nothing like i imagined it would be. that i'm not the girl in the catalog at all. i'm not a happy college student. i don't know who i am. or maybe i do know who i am and i just don't want to be her anymore.

he was right, after all; it didn't leave a scar, though part of me wishes it had. at least i'd have some evidence, some justification of this permanence. stains are even worse when you're the only one who can see them.

but still, that whole day, being with willem, being lulu, it made me realize that all my life i've been living in a small, square room, with no windows and no doors. and i was fine. i was happy, even. i thought. then someone came along and showed me there was a door in the room. one that i'd never even seen before. then he opened it for me. held my hand as i walked through it. and for one perfect day, i was on the other side. i was somewhere else. someone else. and then he was gone, and i was thrown back into my little room. and now, no matter what i do, i can't seem to find that door.

i want to undo this. to make it right. but i have no idea how. i don't seem to know how to open up to people without getting the door slammed in my face. so i do nothing.

we both just stand there on the sidewalk, hands at our sides, unsure of what to say. i hear the neighbor kids yelp in the sprinklers. i think of me and melanie when we were younger, on the high dive at the pool in mexico. we would always hold hands as we jumped, but by the time we swam back up to the surface, we'd have let go. no matter how we tried, once we started swimming, we always let go. but after we bobbed to the surface, we'd climb out of the pool, clamber up the high-dive ladder, clasp hands, and do it again. we're swimming separately now. i get that. maybe it's just what you have to do to keep above water. but who knows? maybe one day, we'll climb out, grab hands, and jump again.

all at once, i finally understand what it means for time to be fluid. because suddenly the entire last year flows before me, condensing and expanding, so that i'm here in amsterdam eating hagelslag, and at the same time, i'm in paris, his hand on my hip, and at the same time, i'm on that first train to london, watching the countryside whiz by, and at the same time, i'm in the line for hamlet. i see willem. at the canal basin, catching my eye. on the train, his jeans still unstained, me still unstained. on the train to paris, his thousand shades of laughter. the destination board shuffles, and i look up at it, and as i do, imagine a different version of time. one in which willem quits while he's ahead. one in which he never makes that remark about my breakfast. one in which he just says good-bye on that platform in london instead of inviting me to paris. or one in which he never stops to talk to me in stratford-upon-avon. and that's when i understand that i have been stained. whether i'm still in love with him, whether he was ever in love with me, and no matter who he's in love with now, willem changed my life. he showed me how to get lost, and then i showed myself how to get found. maybe accident isn't the right word after all. maybe miracle is. or maybe it's not a miracle. maybe this is just life. when you open yourself up to it. when you put yourself in the path of it. when you say yes.