Being a Chicken

There i was, 20 years old hiding under a blanket in a tent sucking on my thumb like a 2 year old thinking it was going to ease my fear. I was wrong. It didn’t really help much at all. I tried to calm myself down, thinking to myself that the noise outside was not a horde of zombies trying to eat my brains or a serial killer with a chainsaw about to chop the top of the tent off and then slice me into little fleshy bloody bits.

Okay, so i was being melodramatic. There were no zombies or serial killers with chainsaws out here, or at least none that i knew of. I was here inside this tent alone, in the dark, and scared — because the silence and darkness of the forest scared me. You would think living in the mountains your whole life would erase the fear of it — apparently not.

Breathe, i say to myself as i start to panic again as visions of horror run through my head. I notice that my thumb has become raisin-y, like after taking a long bath or swimming for hours. I try to listen to my iPod to block out the noise i think is coming from the horde of zombies (which is just actually the pack of dogs owned by the old lady down the road and really loud crickets) but it doesn’t help. I remember my sisters telling me that they would rather have silence when they were scared so they could hear something coming to attack them. I listened to music and covered my ears my whole life when i was scared because i thought i could just block everything else out and transport myself to my own little world.That impulse was crushed as i remembered what my sisters said and began to once again, have visions of evil things that i could not hear stalking me outside my tent.

I pull one earbud out of my ear so i could partially hear what was going on around me. Silence. I panic again. I realize the only reason the silence is scaring me is because it is not silence i can control or was something that i did not create myself. This thought eased my fear a little, but i realized i’d rather be inside the well-lit house then out here alone scared.

So i quickly unzipped the tent, re-zipped it and ran for my dear life, hugging my coat like it was a security blanket, for the front door. When the boy i feel most safe around answered the door, instead of jumping into his perfect warm and comforting arms, i told him nonchalantly that i just needed to use the bathroom.

I locked myself in the bathroom and caught my breath. Telling myself what a chicken i was being. Soon, i could go back out to the tent and fall asleep in warm comforting arms instead of being alone, in darkness, and scared.

Eleanor and Falling

It was a sunny day in March when Eleanor decided to jump off that fifteen-story building in the heart of San Francisco’s financial district. It wasn’t that she was unhappy with her life, but she liked to fall, she thought falling was easy because it didn’t require any skill — all you had to do was just fall. She stood at the edge of the old brick building, staring down. Up here, she felt like she was in the world, but not of it. She watched people, like ants, scurrying about in the world below her.

Eleanor walks to the middle of the roof, stands there her red dress fluttering with the wind and as she stretches out her arms she feels the chilly wind graze her skin gently, she feels special that the world would grace her with such beauty. She takes a deep breath and breaks out into a run, she runs with everything in her body, she runs with the speed, agility, and passion that Olympians only dream about, she runs with all she has just this once. She reaches the end of the building and takes a giant leap. There is no concrete below her now, she begins to fall.

“What do you think Eleanor?” Carlos asked her from the driver’s seat. Eleanor snapped out of her daze and looked at them.

“What?” She asked and her friends laughed, they accused her for always being in her own little world.

They are driving down the coast on the cliffy highways with the windows rolled down. The smell of cigarette smoke and oranges, the sound of the radio and her friend’s laughter litter the air. Alex continues reading the book out loud, a tradition they had during road trips. Sometimes Alex read Shakespeare, other times it was Dahl, Cisneros, Coupland, or Gaiman. He would read the book expertly, with different voices per character that would always make them laugh. His voice had such life and conviction it dripped thick and syrupy like honey as he spoke and it would only make them admire him even more.

Carlos, Suzie, and Eleanor returned to their own little worlds as Alex continued to read Eleanor’s favorite book. Charlie blew cigarette smoke out the window, Suzie munched on Oreos, and Alex put his hand nonchalantly on Eleanor’s . She smiled widely as she felt her heart skip a beat or two, and watched the cigarette smoke from her and Carlos’ cigarettes disappear into the salty sea air.

“And what I don’t say is this” He reads slowly. “That this is also the same sun that makes me think of regal tangerines, dimwitted butterflies and lazy carp. And the ecstatic drops of pomegranate blood seeping from the skin fissures of fruits rotting on the tree branches next door – drops that hang like rubies from their old brown leather source, alluding to the intense ovarian fertility inside.
The carapace of coolness is too much for Claire, also. She breaks the silence by saying that it’s not healthy to live life as a succession of isolated little cool moments “either our lives become stories, or there’s just no way to get through them.”
I agree. Dag agrees. We know that this is why the three of us left our lives behind us and came to the desert – to tell stories and to make our own lives worthwhile tales in the process.”

There is silence in the car, the four contemplating what Alex had just read. If one listened closely, you could hear Eleanor smile. It may not be healthy to live life as a succession of isolate little cool moments, she thought, but that’s what makes life beautiful. We go through the suffering, the crap, and the shit life throws at us, and this is what gets us through them: the thought of these perfect, irreplaceable moments and the promise that there will always be more.

She hears the wind whistling as she fell, oh the sensation of falling is the best feeling in the world, she thinks. The whole world seems to have gone into the slowest slow motion there was. A woman in a fur coat and red shoes turns the corner and crosses the street to Pine, and a serious business man folds his newspaper on the corner of Sansome. The sky is orange, and somewhere in the world somebody else was falling too, she thinks.

“What are you thinking about?” She asks Charlie.
“That I am lying on the roof of a chicken restaurant, under the stars, with a beautiful girl” Charlie says. Eleanor feels her heart swell. She kisses the forehead of her first real boyfriend, and returns to the embrace of the warm gentle arms she never wants to leave.

“Run!” Nick screams, and she begins to run as fast as she can. Nick is holding her hand as they run, their shoes making a clacking sound on the cobblestone streets of San Antonio. She shrieks and giggles at the same time, no idea why or where they are running to. It is 3 o’clock in the morning, and Eleanor is sixteen.

“Nick!” Pleading to him for answers. “Where the hell are we going?”

He only laughs and continues running. They run faster, and faster, and he stops abruptly causing them both to fall on the ground. She falls on top of him and they laugh for no reason, he kisses her on the forehead. Nick and Eleanor continue to lie in the middle of the cobblestone street laughing at nothing in particular. As the giggling subsides, he pulls her into his arms. “Run away with me Eleanor” he whispers into her ear. She says nothing. He gets up and reaches for an arm to pull her to her feet and into an embrace. “Run away with me, Eleanor” he says a second time. “We’ll live by the beach and have a cat named Horatio, we’ll have a garden of tomatoes, a library full of books, a balcony that overlooks the sea and we’ll build sandcastles all day long” Nick continues to dream out loud. “We’ll catch crab and fish and roast them on a bonfire, and we’ll lie on the beach – your head on my lap and I’ll read to you as you fall asleep, just you and me”.

She begins to cry, wishing she hadn’t jumped. Wishing she could take it all back. It is too late, the ground is approaching, and soon it shall be painted with her blood like a Jackson Pollock painting.

Eleanor sat in the front seat of her Parent’s car with her nanny, her mother driving, and her sisters asleep in back seat. She is eight. She watches the rain drops trickle down the window one after the other, and notices how the rain makes everything just a little bit blurry, like a dream. She stares at the billboards; one for shampoo, the other for instant noodles, the next for cheese ice cream.

In one swift moment, her mother slams on the brakes of their new Isuzu trooper, the breaks lock up, she swerves and hits the island, the car flies into the air landing on its back, Eleanor tumbles through the windshield and lies in a field of broken glass on the highway, she feels the rain rolling down her cheeks.

She wakes up in the back of a truck that she had never seen before with her mom, her sisters, and her nanny. Her favorite shirt – a white one with fishes on it, was no longer white but red from her blood.

She wakes up next in a hospital bed, doctors operating on her wrist, removing shards of windshield glass from it. She sees her wrist cut open and begins to scream. She screams and cries, and thrashes her legs about. The doctors try to calm her down, but she won’t. She is eight, and she is scared. They inject her with something and she falls asleep again. She remembers dreaming about rain and cheese ice cream.

There are explosions after explosions in the sky, this part of the province that is usually silent and tranquil is interrupted. It is New Year’s Eve and Eleanor is ten. The Beach Boy’s greatest hits CD that Eleanor’s parents had given her for Christmas was playing on the stereo loudly. They drank hot chocolate and sat by the window on their house on the hill and watched the city’s fireworks explode and create pattern after pattern from every crack and corner of the horizon. Her two sisters giggled as they sucked the marshmallows in their hot chocolate through their teeth. Eleanor sat between her parents, tapping her feet and singing Good Vibrations. Her father pulled her off the window and they began to dance to the beach boys, her father twirling her around in her red polka-dotted dress, her sisters doing the twist, and her mother watching them and smiling. Midnight rolled around and the whole family picked up their pots, pans, and ladles, and paraded up and down all the houses on the hill banging them loudly, deafening and scaring away evil spirits (and the cats and dogs) with the noise.

“I’m so fucking happy!” Suzie shrieks. They stand in the middle of the crowd at a concert jumping up and down and enjoying the music. Suzie is wearing a green shirt she had just spent 30$ on at the stand where they sold the band’s merchandise. It was a nice shirt, Eleanor and Christian agreed that it was worth the 30$.

Eleanor will remember the smile on Suzie’s face, the biggest one she has ever seen, for the rest of her life. She admired Suzie’s childish excitement and innocence and wished she could be like her sometimes.

The band begins to play Eleanor’s favorite song and the smile on her face almost matched Suzie’s, she feels goosebumps on her skin. She stands lost in the crowd, stuck in a moment, with the music playing in her ears – pleasantly deafening, and an excited crowd of hundreds bouncing up and down around her. Everything is in slow motion. She snaps out of the moment and begins to bang her head around, dancing and jumping up and down like there is no tomorrow, her friends laugh and join in, they all go crazy and let go. They forget about all the things dragging them down in life, relationship, school, and work. All that mattered to them in this moment was jumping around like a bunch of idiots and escaping from the world. Like Christian had said earlier as they lined up to get in to the theatre, this was their escapism. There was something therapeutic about standing in the middle of the crowd with a soundtrack as you just let go. Eleanor agreed.

The band’s lead singer stopped singing, but the horns, guitars, bass, and drums did not. He told the crowd to scream, he told them to scream like the last time, he told them to scream for everyone they knew, he told them to scream for their friends, family, lovers, enemies, and the man at the grocery check-out counter, he told them to scream for everyone in the world who could not, and they did. They screamed so loud and long that their voices would be gone in the morning. They screamed deafening everyone around them, they screamed to let go, they screamed to fall apart, they screamed for every single fucking person in the world who could not, they cried too, the moment unnervingly beautiful and touching, Eleanor could see tears not only on Suzie and Christian’s faces, but on the faces of the strangers around her. Their last scream was the loudest, they screamed with every single ounce of fiber in their being until their voices rasped and died.

Eleanor was mere feet from the ground, she had stopped crying. The sensation of falling calmed her and made her feel like she was flying. There was a smile on her face now and she was content and ready for whatever came next. The sky was orange and it was a beautiful day. Somewhere in the world, as she fell, someone was sailing a boat in the ocean, dancing pirouettes on a marble floor, eating ice cream and letting it melt down their chins, there were people falling in love and out of it, and their were people rolling down grassy hills and sitting in the rain. In the last few seconds before she hit the pavement on the northwest corner of Pine and Sansome Streets, she thought about more of the moments and people in her life. Her and Alex curled up beside each other on her sofa eating strawberry pop tarts and watching old black and white movies, Resting her head on Charlie’s chest as he read her a story with a girl named Jay as she fell asleep with a smile on her face, going on roadtrips with her sister with the windows rolled down singing loudly and flirting with boys in cars, her adventures with Suzie and Cecilia in the vast beautiful city that was unknown to them, falling in love with Nick in San Antonio, sitting on the rooftop of a building back home with Carlos and Maria stoned out of their minds watching the bustle of the city life go on around them, crying in the security line of the airport as she said goodbye to her family to move to San Francisco. Memory after memory played in her head.

She hit the ground, and everything went black. She painted the sidewalk with her blood like a Jackson Pollock painting. Her fragile bones cracked and shattered, sprawled on the pavement like a marionette. People screamed, but she could not hear.

Maggots

His words eat at my brain like a swarm of vampire maggots. I cant commit, i cant commit, i cant commit he says.The maggots chew through my brain enjoying every ounce of information about hats and books and cigarettes they digest. He says it again and again which makes me want to bash my head repeatedly at the wall and watch the blood trickle down the tile. Pain is nothing compared to hearing those words. The maggots suck the blood and chew on little fleshy pink bits of my brain, fragments of memories playing in their heads as they eat the corresponding pieces.

He says it again and still he holds me. I want to unleash the maggots on him. I want to bash his head in the wall, again and again until he stops. All i want to do is get out of here, but he wont let me go, and he wont stop saying it. So i wait, i wait for these creatures to finish eating my brain, and i wait until i collapse on the floor into a heap of nothing.

A walk

I walk through most of the city alone, but i do not mind. As i walk, i dream daydreams and sing quietly to myself. I scheme schemes, and write romances in my head as i watch my feet take slow paced steps on the concrete. On Pine and Sansome — the heart of the financial district, i inch my way slowly through seas of suited sheep, only i stand out in a red polka dotted dress and a black beret. I stare at vast looming buildings of glass and steel and wonder when it will all come crashing down on top of us in a swift malfunction of gravity.

On Nob hill, i am joined by C., We stare at beautiful british boys with graceful clouds of smoke constantly billowing out of their beaked lips and tangling in their curls. We sit on the wrought iron cafe tables on the sidewalks and sip our exotic teas, perplexed and jaded, making plans of company and sorting life.

The mission, populated by indie kids and spicy passionate hispanics is filled with the promise of great love, good weed, and even better taquerias. I roll down the dewy hills of dolores park and watch people lose control, wishing i could do the same. I smoke cigarettes and curl up in the grass with Murakami as he tells me of two sisters, connected and disconnected, finding their way in life.

I find myself lost in chinese restaurants and herb stores near home, the Parkside, walking through the streets and staring at signs in different languages. Asians and Irish left and right, though i am asian, i do not look like one. I understand now what my father says about being a mutt of different ethnicities — you never really fit in anywhere. I reach home and curl up under warm rusty blankets in the safety and comfort of my own world. Graceful grecian beauties on my wall, smoking cigarettes, drinking absinthe, and lying in flowers, and a former life and my past smiling at me from behind glass and frames. Matt Beringer and Amy Millan whisper bittersweet lullabies as i watch the rain and fog outside, thinking about how miserable and wet everyone else is.

When the sun comes out, i run, i run to the ocean in the horizon. I run to lose this weight pulling on me and making me feel bloated and ugly, i run to forget, i run to remember. I run to feel the sweat rolling off my skin in beads, soaking my clothes in salt. I feel the sea air brush against my face, biting and cold. When my legs begin to feel like jello, i collapse on the sand and watch the sunset. I feel the sand crawling under my toenails and in the small folds of skin. My breath is heavy as i light a cigarette, the smoke in my lungs make them feel like they will explode, but i smoke anyway.

Melocoton crawls in bed beside me and squeezes my hand reassuringly, he holds me close and tender and says things that make me swoon. Guitars, pianos, trumpets, and violins are the soundtrack to our romance as my arms are wrapped around his warm bare skin. We hurt as we lie in each others arms and trace shapes on the others face gently with the tips of our fingers. On this bed, our bodies break, our hearts break, but we are masochists and still return to it nightly for more.

I walk through most of the city alone, but most days i do not mind.

Elizabeth

There are a million things about Elizabeth that make me fall in love with her again and again.

She throws her head back just a little bit everytime she laughs and smiles with her whole face. When she hears a song she likes, she looks like a child on christmas after they finished unwrapping each gift carelessly, happy and excited and lying on a little mountain of disheveled red and green christmas wrapping. I could go on and on.

Elizabeth starts singing along to Billie Holiday in that quiet sultry voice of hers and begins to sway her hips oh-so-slowly and spins like she’s doing pirouettes in slow motion.

“I want someone who won’t run away when they find out what’s wrong with me” She says sadly. “For once, i want someone who will stay”

I want to tell her that i will stay, but i’m too scared.

Elizabeth is a warm chocolate souffle with raspberry filling. She a vase of sunflowers in a white room. She is a thousand origami paper cranes and a wish. She is the happy memory you recall on your deathbed. She is a pomegranate sunset. She is the trumpets in La Vie En Rose. She is Morrisey’s voice. She is the last cherry jellybean and your favorite book.

She is all these things, but not mine. Never mine.

A Long December

“Anna?”

She stares blankly into the darkness of the room, there is a long pause before she replies. “I’m sorry, Everett”.

Everett stares at Anna longingly for a moment and he shakes his head in frustration. He tries to speak, but cannot find the words. He gets up to leave, walks towards the door, and stops as he is about to exit, slowly turning back to her, still trying to find the words. “Anna, i love you, but sometimes, i dont know if you’re worth all of this”.

He breathes a heavy sigh, stares at her like his heart had just shattered into a million tiny fragments and walks out the door.

Anna sits in the armchair speechless her eyes still upon the door Everett had just exited through. She realizes that she had just made the biggest mistake of her life, but he was gone, and it was too late. There was going to be no chasing, or begging for him to come back. It was over, like summer was now, the warm air had gone, and now it was just chilly and dark and the leaves coated the dully grey pavement in a carpet of fiery foliage. Winter loomed in the distance, bringing with it the promise of rain, fog, and the unforgiving chill in air. It was going to be a long December indeed.

Let Go

His voice was like an old gramophone, unpolished and rusty, sitting in a dusty corner of a forgotten library of a victorian-era mansion. Rasping away as he told me stories of love, lost and found then lost again as we smoked cheap cigarettes and drank pomegranate alco-pops. The sound of the piano from the distance, sweet and haunting, echoing through the emptiness. He held out his hand, let’s dance, he said. And i did. We danced the saddest dance, we danced the happiest dance, he held me close, and when he tried to leave I didn’t let go, not this time.

Murasaki Blue

It was a cold that night, the chill in the march breeze almost made sitting at that beach unbearable if it weren’t for the thick wool coat wrapped around her shoulders. Ava came here some nights to think and to remember those good old days. The memories were like an old black and white photograph, a moment captured so perfectly, just weathered and dusty enough that you would have to squint to see the picture clearly. She lay in the sand staring up into the vast openess of the sky, tracing patterns and figures in the stars with the tip of her fingers. The sound of the waves crashing and breaking on the rocks by the shore, the sound of the seafoam bubbling on the sand was her soundtrack for the evening.

She remembered that night like it was yesterday. They had come to this exact spot at an odd hour of the night. They were pleasantly tipsy from a few rounds of margaritas from dinner, as they had reached the shore, there was a flurry of shoes being pulled off, pairs of socks flying in different directions, and pants being rolled up to their knees. For a second, their inner children took over, forcing themselves to forget the things that they had been trying to drink away only hours earlier, they ran towards the water dove in. Profanity came out of all their mouths as they realized how cold the ocean was and they all quickly ran back towards the beach and collapsed on the ground. Sand beginning to latch itself all over their bodies, inside the folds and pockets of their pants, and in rather uncomfortable places. They all sat there side-by-side in front of their driftwood bonfire until the sun came up.

She missed the pristine white sand of home, here, the sand was a greyish-brown color and much more coarse. At home the air would be hot and humid, but the sea breeze would make it all bearable. The palm trees would whistle quietly every time the wind blew and there would be a different set of star constellations in the sky. Here, she thought, was the perfect setting for a romance. Someone else’s maybe. It was unlikely that it would be her own, she was unlucky in love that way.
The rain began to fall, but she did not move from her spot. Raindrops rolled down her cheeks like tears did, and fell to the ground leaving miniscule indentations in the sand. The rain let up minutes later, and Ava began to daydream of her romance that would occur in this spot, and she would do that until the sun rose.

Secret Meeting

He says “Shhh.. everything will be alright” in the most reassuring way, and she believes him. No questions, no hesitations, no doubts, not one fleeting thought. They lie on soft warm grass, her head rising and falling on his stomach as he breathes. Cigarette smoke gets tangled in the soft brown waves of his hair, she watches the smoke find its way out of the curls and she is reminded of clouds and how, from the stratosphere, to look down on them is like looking at mountains and hills of snow and endless glaciers. He touches her arm and tells her she looks like she is a million miles away. No, she says, not a million, but a few thousand at least. She tells him in her head, she is lying on a hammock, curled up under the warm sun on the silent, pristine beaches of Spain. She smells the salt from the sea and the freshly caught bright orange crab boiling in the kitchen for supper. She is watching the waves break upon the shore and smoking french cigarettes as the sun sets. His mouth curves upward, into something that looks like a smile, but it isn’t. It is sad. One day, i will be there with you, he says. She gives a slight smile and lights her cigarette. Someday you will be, she says, someday. He touches her hair, softly stroking it with his fingers, and they fall asleep in the grass, she is dreaming of beaches in Spain and orange crab and he is dreaming of being there with her.

What Sarah Said

Sarah sat by the fountain, nursing a cigarette between her fingers. Music played in her ears, barely drowning out the load roar of the waterfall. She sat patiently waiting for him to show up. It was a long shot, she thought, but maybe after the kind of week she had this one thing could possibly go her way. Just this one thing was all she asked for.

She stared out over the park and watched people coming and going. Couples making out in bushes, children playing, friends lying in the grass talking, everyone seemed to be happy. A seagull flew above her head and grazed the flat surface of the pond with its claws, hesitating only for a few minutes, and then diving into the cold water without a splash. The sun sank lower behind the cityscape in front of her turning the sky into a bright red and purple that reminded her of plum-flavored jellybeans and pomegranates. The chill in the air caused her to zip her jacket higher around her and rub her hands together quickly to create heat from friction to warm them.

She began to daydream of what he and her would do after he arrived. He would smile widely at the sight of her – the same smile that caused her to swoon and melt every time she’d saw it. She’d smile widely back. He’d say the most charming thing he possibly could, she’d blush and forget that he was late. Then they would get up and walk to the grass, and lay there for hours and hours on end, talking about the most random things, her head resting on his chest and his hand wrapped across her body like a seatbelt. The daylight would disappear around them and the sky would turn murky orange instead of the pitch black like every city that boasted enough lights and pollution and the vast emptiness of space would be barely visible through the blanket of dull grey clouds.

–

Jacob arrived at the park eighteen minutes after Sarah told him to be there. He had realized that she had not mentioned a specific place to meet her, so with a shrug of frustration, he threw his books and bag on the grass and taken a seat beside it. He assumed he’d spot her, or she’d spot him – the park wasn’t that big anyway. He rummaged through his brown suede mail bag and produced a pack of cigarettes, taking one out from its box and resting it between his lips. He then lit it, and with a heavy sigh, he rested his head on his bag, the grass poking at his skin through his sweater. He stared up at the setting sky, and breathed the cloud of white cancerous smoke towards the green tree tops while thinking of Sarah.

–

Sarah and Jacob had finally gotten up from lying in the grass for hours, it was midnight now, Sarah imagined. The city was empty – like a ghost town except for the few homeless people wrapped up in blankets, boxes, and sleeping bags on the sidewalks, so silent, save for the few cats rummaging through dumpsters and the occasional car that drove by the empty streets. The lack of population made Sarah feel like they were the only two people left in the world, she wanted to stand in the middle of the road and dance like nobody was watching. She wanted to stand on top of the highest building and yell obscene profanities at the empty city below. Sarah wanted to break loose of the mold the world was trying to shape her into, she wanted for once in her life to break loose and go wild, to tell the world to go fuck itself instead of conforming to its bullshit rules. Instead, they would stop at the only open coffee place there was, and order some coffee to go to warm up their cold, numb, bodies and they would continue to walk without a specific destination throughout the city, their feet taking them wherever they pleased. They walked through Chinatown, then to North Beach, then down to the Piers. They were too distracted to even notice how far they had walked.

–

Jacob sat back up on the grass, growing more and more impatient for Sarah’s arrival. Was she here? Had she not come at all? Had she came and gone before he got here?

The questions repeated in his head over and over again. Jacob glanced from his watch to his surroundings looking for her. Frustrated, he turned the music playing in his ears loudly and surrendered to watching people coming and going from the park. In the corner of his eye, over the park’s man-made waterfall sculpture, he spotted a girl who looked much like Sarah sitting by the top, smoking a cigarette, and looking up at the sky. He couldn’t be entirely sure it was her, so he didn’t want to get up to check. Jacob decided to watch her instead to prove it was, and then when he was sure, he’d go up there. Daylight was quickly disappearing, and the air was cold and unforgiving. He drummed his fingers on the ground and began to pull up grass from the ground, imagining the shrieks of pain that he would be hearing from the grass if he could hear it.

–

The water was quiet as the two walked down the Embarcadero, only the sound of the waves crashing and breaking on the walls and the occasional squawk of a seagull was audible. The sky was darker here and the stars were visible, Sarah assumed that it was because it was further away from the lights of downtown. The smell of salt water air made her think of home, and lying in the pristine white sand under the warm tropical sun. Their hands were tightly clasped together as they leaned over the wooden railing that kept them from falling to their deaths in the water below, their bodies’ heat keeping their fingers from growing cold and numb. They stared out across at the horizon, pointing out places and towns from across the bay – The campanili at the UC Berkeley campus, the Berkeley Hills, the port of Oakland, and the like. Out of nowhere, Jacob raised their clasped fingers to his lips and gently planted a kiss on her fingers. There it was, the meaningless gesture, her movie-script ending, just like how they described it.

–

It was nearing six, and Jacob was cold and hungry. All he had wanted to do was get a cup of coffee and go home to bed, but he still watched the girl sitting by the waterfall. He was almost positive it was her now, she dressed like Sarah, she smoked a cigarette like Sarah, but he just needed one more piece of proof it was her. Just then, the church bells chimed six o’clock and a strong breeze blew, sending a mist of water towards the girl. She shrieked out of amusement and smiled widely as she tried to shelter herself from the cold mist with her purse. That was the smile he could recognize from miles away, that signature awkward, toothy, fanged, smile that made him feel the way he did about her. In one swift movement he got off the ground, grabbed his things, and quickly walked to the spot where she was sitting.

–

A strong breeze blew a mist of water Sarah’s way, returning her to reality. Fuck, she said out loud to nobody in particular as she tried to shield herself from the attack of the mist. The bells in the tower of the tower in the church across the park chimed six o’clock and the birds and/or bats in the trees started humming loudly. It was completely dark now and the street lights began to one by one turn on. She pulled the hood of her jacket over her head to protect her from the cold, picked up her things, and left. She resigned herself to the fact that he wasn’t going to show up, and that nothing this week would go her way. The breeze blew off her hood as she walked down the lane, and her red curls flew in the wind. Being a hopeless romantic, she thought, was both her defining point and her downfall… but it was mostly her downfall.

–

Jacob had finally gotten to the spot he had seen Sarah sitting, but it was empty. She was gone. He frowned, thinking about how much of an idiot he was that he hadn’t gotten up to check earlier. With much disappointment he sat in the spot she had been sitting at earlier and lit a cigarette. Just then, a seagull flew above his head, grazing its claws in the flat surface of the water, hesitating only briefly before diving into the cold water without a splash.