“Meet me in the bathroom in two minutes.” Adjusting his crotch, he slid out of the booth and walked bowl legged to the family style restroom.
Cigarette smoke lingered on my tongue, it tasted wrong. I lifted my fingers against my lips, they were swollen and bruised. I thought Barret would make me forget but really he made remember how you and I fit so perfectly. You have ruined sex for me because you showed me how amazing it is when love is involved.
I abandoned Barret in the bathroom and drove to a motel where my tears soaked the pillow. It has been fifty-five hours, two minutes and eleven seconds since I left you kneeling in the snow.
Haven
Dear Andrew,
California is a gold dusted mirage in the middle of a sprawling dessert. Palm trees reach as high as the sky and waves lap against the seashell-strewn beaches. I arrived in San Diego as planned, but kept driving until I hit Los Angeles, or more specifically Santa Monica. There is a creative energy here that you would thrive in. Art is everywhere. Painted on the walls, the sidewalks, and even hanging off telephone wires. I can imagine us buying a bungalow and growing old and wrinkly together here.
Although my pockets are empty, my soul feels full. Each morning, I wake up and bike ride to a small diner that has been there since the 1930s. The food is cheap and the coffee is stale but there is something about it that reminds me of home. Words flow from my ballpoint pen to the stained pages of my journal while the sunny afternoon sun beckons. The stories aren’t very good, or even memorable, but they are stories nonetheless. I don’t know if this is my calling in life, to be a writer. For right now that doesn’t matter. I’m grabbing onto my happiness where I can find it.
Yesterday a man with your color hair caused my heart to flip while hope surged. I almost ran up and flung my arms around his neck. When he turned around though, that’s where the resemblance stopped. To say it was a huge letdown would be an understatement. There are fourteen voicemails from you, one each day I have been gone. Thirteen are unlistened to. During a lapse in weakness, I closed my eyes, scrolled randomly and pressed play.
“Haven….” You paused as if you were waiting for me to answer. When I didn’t, a sigh brimming with regret shuttered across the line. “There are a million things I want to say to you but all the apologies in the world won’t be enough. I messed up and I’ll have to live with that for the rest of my life. Just know this: I’ll always love you. Always.”
Tossing the phone aside, I curled my body into a ball as guilt ate away at my insides. I have a confession to make, Andrew. Your fraternity ring was what made this road trip possible. Before leaving Detroit, I hocked it at a pawnshop. The sleazy storeowner gave me close to a thousand dollars which, combined with my savings, was just enough. I’m not proud of what I did but you will get every last cent back, promise.
My anger toward you dims each day, however, the betrayal doesn’t. It sits like a heavy stone in my stomach. Nonetheless, I’m grateful for all the blessings you gave me during our short relationship. Sumiko owes her sobriety to you. She is currently at a rehab center in Santa Barbara. Once her court ordered two months are up, I invited her to live with me. Sumiko said she will think about it, which is better than nothing.
I don’t know when I’ll see you again. Santa Monica’s salty ocean air is the balm over my wounds and I have decided to stay here for the immediate future. Figure out who I am and who I want to become. Typical twenty-three-year-old soul searching. There is one thing I’m certain of though: I don’t regret meeting you, Andrew. You are the best and worst thing that has ever happened to me. The best because you showed me how to fall in love. The worst because you got exclusive lifelong rights to my heart. I’ll never love anybody like I loved you.
It has been 336 hours, 2 minutes and 1 second since I left you kneeling in the snow.
Haven
Three Months Later
Locking my door, I bounded down the steps to where my beach cruiser awaited. The baby blue bicycle had a basket in the rear for my groceries. The fog blanketed the streets as it did in the early mornings. My co-workers didn’t understand why I wanted the six a.m. shift but this was why. In Los Angeles, nobody got up before the sun rose. I had the normally congested city to myself. Plus, the weather reminded me of the gloomy winters back home. Peddling the measly ten flat blocks to the coffee shop, eighties music blasted through my headphones. After my road trip had ended, the obsession for cheesy love ballads only grew. Tina Turner hit one of her high notes as I pulled up in front of Cafe Solo. Painted a soft pink, the Spanish style building had two planter boxes underneath the windows, overflowing with succulents. Fredrick, the owner, had a deep affection for California architecture. Speak of the devil; he sat at a table near the bar, a shot of espresso and a half eaten croissant in front of him. Shrouded in darkness, the cafe didn’t open for another thirty minutes.
Flicking the lights on, Fredrick glanced up and smiled. “You should learn to appreciate the darkness.”
This was our routine every morning. I replied with my standard response. “Nothing good comes out darkness.”
“From darkness comes…”
“Light,” I said. “I know.”
Fredrick wiped the crumbs off the table into his wrinkled palm. Nearing eighty years old, he looked decades younger. I hadn’t seen him in anything other than a three-piece pinstriped suit and a silk necktie since I’d started working at Cafe Solo.
Fredrick had become a surrogate grandfather. He took me underneath his wing, providing a place for me to live and work. The tiny apartment above his garage would ordinarily rent for fifteen hundred a month but he’d cut me a deal, saying I reminded him of his granddaughter. She lived back home in Cuba with Fredrick’s daughter and he only saw them twice a year. Fredrick’s and my lack of family bonded us together in the first place. A regular at the diner I frequented, we got to know each other and forged a bond. Grabbing a rag, I cleaned Fredrick’s table of his dirty dishes. He waved the Los Angeles Times in the air.
“I read your article,” he bellowed. “Pure genius.”
I blushed. “I wouldn’t call it an article. It’s a blurb about my friend’s band.”
“Still, not everybody can say they wrote for the Los Angeles Times.”
“Guess that’s true.”
In my spare time, I also worked as a freelance journalist, something I fell into by chance. Los Angeles was a city of connections. Everybody knew everybody and had at least one valuable friend or family member in their back pocket. My co-worker Morgan’s father owned an independent art magazine. By accident, I’d left my journal lying open and she’d read my short story about the stolen sun. Morgan encouraged me to submit it to her father’s magazine. I did and it was accepted. The past couple of months, assignments had been steady, which was extra income to send to Andrew. I stuffed the checks in an envelope without a return address. Although, he hasn’t cashed a single one, it’s the principle of the matter.