Vapor Trails

I wanted to go with her to the gate—or at least as far as security would allow—but she stopped me.

Sarah held up her ticket, printed in my apartment, and waved it as if it meant something. I’ve got everything, she said when my expression didn’t change. She tugged at her suitcase as if reminding me it was there, but also indicating she didn’t need help with it.

Right, I replied, not sure what else to say.

We’d already made the plans for me to drive her before things slipped and cracked between us. I was the only option now, everyone was busy or otherwise unavailable, and things had changed too rapidly to have reneged and gotten the help of someone else. Someone less ill-equipped. But I was still happy to do it despite the hour of awkward silence as we drifted along the highway and the buildings got shorter and less frequent, before the tower jutted out of the hills. Planes lifted off, their roar occasionally giving texture to our quiet.

Thank you for the ride, she said, smiling. I had seen her smile in the short months we’d known each other. Her real smile, I mean. This wasn’t one of those.

Yeah, of course. I’m happy to do it, I like giving people rides. It was true, too, though perhaps less so than ever before.

Well, thanks again. She dipped her head and turned to the security gate. She walked away without looking back. I made it out of the short term parking garage before tears clouded my vision and I had to stop and sob with my head in my hands.

A month later I got my first text from her. I was aching to send her more than the one I already had, a meek hope that she had landed safely followed by a question of how she was settling in.

She had met someone. They went to museums, took weekend trips to the beach. I was delighted to hear from her, almost as much as I hated hearing about him.

That’s what people do, honey, my mother said on the rare occasion I talked about it. She was right, I knew that. Sarah was the pretty American girl, studying abroad in a city with an avid night life. People meet each other. I wasn’t hurt because there was a betrayal, we weren’t close enough anymore that I could claim that—if we ever were. No, I was hurt because I had to witness it rather than live it.

I tried to be normal, but finally I asked her to not talk about him. She said she couldn’t do that, that he was a part of her life there. I knew that was a reasonable thing to say, that she, like my mother, was right. I dropped it, and she dropped me.

I was walking under the stars one night the next summer. The roadways were empty, just amber streetlights casting their glow as midnight neared. The plague was a deadly snowbank, all around us even in those quiet, lonely moments. I still thought about her. I still talked about her occasionally when the memories particularly aggrieved me and I couldn’t stand it, or I had a willing listener—either for the first time, or just someone understanding enough to hear it all again.

I wish I could remember exactly what I felt when I saw her name flash across my phone screen that night. I know my feet stopped as if trapped in lead. She was back in the States. At the first whispers of the virus she had flown back and been home for months. She wanted to know how I was doing, how I was handling the whole thing.

I tried so hard. I wanted to show her that I had moved on even though that was a lie. I wanted her to like me again. Her only explanation before she flew to Oslo was that she never felt that spark between us. I think I wanted her to suddenly feel it, but I knew I was just desperate for her not to disappear again.

We texted for a day before I asked her to delete my number. I was honest that I wanted to keep talking, but doing so was painful. I didn’t want to be apart from her, but she was only okay with that as long as there was the distance between us of friends. But I couldn’t do that. We’d closed that distance, that’s how we started. To open it again, to lose that felt...insurmountable.

She understood. I don’t know if she deleted my number or maybe she still has it saved, maybe she still pulls it up and wonders if she should reach out again.

I’ll never know because I deleted hers in a fit of tears, the next night under a different street lamp. I deleted our conversation and screamed into my fist after I’d done it, my knees buckling as I fell to the pavement. Tears stained my face and I wretched into the gutter, a black, poisonous feeling trying to find the fastest way out of my body. Somewhere along the way I had discovered a taste for gin—the abrasive pine of the cheap stuff was a convenient way to briefly forget—but even half-drunk on that street corner, with a flask in my pocket, I immediately wished I had been stronger.

I wanted to be stronger in an effort to keep around what was already a vacuous dream.

By Rob Docherty