How They Met, and Other Stories(50)
Author: David Levithan

It takes a thousand people to create an accident. The man who installed the traffic sign a little askew. The woman who held the elevator for an extra moment as the driver left his office. The driver’s great-grandmother, who fell in love with the man at the hat shop. The driver’s two-thirty appointment, who had to put him on hold because of another call (his ten-year-old daughter). The technician who made the song on the radio sound so good. The television weatherman who had predicted rain.

Person after person after person…they all converge at one moment, irrevocably changing the course of a thousand more lives.

As it is with accidents, so it is with love.

Meredith and John are standing in the Elysian Fields, on the edge of Hoboken, overlooking the New York City skyline. The sky is so dark that all the lights are magical. It is late in the hour, late in the night, late in the year. And yet the air is filled with beginnings—sweet, giddy lightness and the languid feel of clocks at rest.

John and Meredith dance. They dance to the sound of the fabric-maker who made John’s sleeve so soft. They dance to the sound of their families’ arguments, and to the sound of their grandparents’ praise. They dance to the sounds that are carried in the airwaves around them—radio transmissions at lunar speed, one of which carries Meredith’s favorite song from high school, bound for another listener, miles away.

They dance to the sound of a baby’s heartbeat. They dance to the sound of their first kiss.

Somewhere back in time, a boy named Daryl broke Meredith’s heart. Somewhere back in time, John woke up driving at night, and swerved just in time to miss a tree. Somewhere back in time, Meredith’s parents said I love you. Somewhere back in time, a man said, This land should be a park. Another man’s wife named it Elysian Fields.

Right now, a man in a red Chevrolet is driving by. Right now, John’s boss is getting ready for bed—her husband rolls over and gives her a corner of his pillow. Right now, the friend who taught Meredith to kiss in fourth grade is thinking about her, wondering where she is.

Every two people cause an intersection.

Every person alters the world.

Meredith’s grandparents were married so long that their time together acquired all the time before and all the time after, so it could be truly said that they are married forever. John’s parents are much the same way.

At any given moment, there are millions of people saying their lover’s name. The words travel through the air.

Meredith leans into John, her hand loosely on his sleeve. He pushes a stray hair behind her ear and leaves his palm on her cheek. Then he retreats, and moves closer. The lights of Manhattan twinkle.

They kiss.

Maybe fate’s arithmetic is so diffuse that it’s not arithmetic at all.

The lights. The sleeve. The park. The taxpayers of Hoboken. The parents. The friends. The past. The swaying of the streetlights. The car passing. The present. The hopes. The break-ups. The conversations. The invention of the lightbulb.

It is the miracle of all these things coming together that constitutes love. The orchestra has been assembled…and now it plays.

It doesn’t have to be on Valentine’s Day. It doesn’t have to be by the time you turn eighteen or thirty-three or fifty-nine. It doesn’t have to conform to whatever is usual. It doesn’t have to be kismet at once, or rhapsody by the third date.

It just has to be. In time. In place. In spirit.

It just has to be.

Two people in a park—

They kiss.

An intersection.

One day when he was bored in physics class, David Levithan decided to write a Valentine’s Day story for his friends. With this one small decision, his future as an electromagnetic engineer was doomed…and a new story-writing tradition was born. He’s been writing stories for his friends ever since, and eventually some other people wanted to read them. A few of the stories got really long, too, and became novels. These include Boy Meets Boy, The Realm of Possibility, Are We There Yet?, Marly’s Ghost (illustrated by Brian Selznick), Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist (written with Rachel Cohn), Wide Awake, and Naomi and Ely’s No Kiss List (written with Rachel Cohn). He’s also interested in collecting other people’s stories (true or fictional), most recently in The Full Spectrum: A New Generation of Writing About Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, Questioning, and Other Identities (edited with Billy Merrell), This Is PUSH, and 21 Proms (edited with Daniel Ehrenhaft).

David’s senior-yearbook entry started with a quote from Philip Roth: “And as he spoke, I was thinking, ‘the kind of stories that people turn life into, the kind of lives people turn stories into.’” He is still intrigued that his seventeen-year-old self chose those words.