Place to Love
“I think…I’m in love,” she tells me one day over coffee. She hadn’t taken a sip of hers all morning, but held the cup between her pale hands like one holds a teddy bear one is afraid to cuddle. I don’t know why she held such an awkward stance as if I, or anyone else, would ridicule her for this statement of fact.
“So who’s the guy?” I ask, taking yet another sip from my cup.
She looks up at me, looking even more scared and nervous than she was before. Her face is so pale it is just about blue.
“It’s…not…a person,” she says breaking eye contact with me and looking into her coffee. “It’s a place.”
“A place?” I ask. I suppose I sounded too harsh because she doesn’t respond. Although I wanted her to repeat it, part of me wasn’t quite sure I could believe what I thought I just heard. “What sort of a place?”
“You know the end of the road before the cliff to the ocean? There. If you stop there and look out over the blue…you can smell freedom. The birds, the butterflies, and the sailboats down below so small they look like they’re fit for dolls and so fragile, they could be made out of paper. Wild poppies grow on the side of the road and if the wind is just right you can catch a scent of honeysuckle from the fields on the outcropping miles below you. The field travels down and around on either side of you, but in that spot you could be on top of the world!”
She put down her coffee cup, a little life in her cheeks. “But I don’t suppose you’d know,” she says softly. She blushes and stays silent, glancing out the large windows to the ocean below the shop.
“You’re not going to be very happy if you’re in love with a place,” I say.
“Well it’s better than always being in love with a person who won’t love you back. A place might not love me back, but it can’t love another,” she snaps.
I put down my mug, angrily. That statement hit too close to home. “You’re not letting yourself leave this place, you’ve got to move on eventually.”
She shakes her head. “I’ll find someone who will stay here with me.”
“Do you think you’ll love him as much as you love that place?”
She looks at me harshly. “It’s a different sort of love.”
“That didn’t answer my question.”
She stands up and walks towards the door taking one last long look at me before going out. Honesty, I am good for, and perhaps too much so. I stand up after a moment, pay the bill and then leave. The ocean was always good for a breeze, but I would be happy to move out and move on. Maybe I’d come back home, but I needed to find a home to come back to it. I glanced out over the water. This place was certainly picturesque, but was I in love with it?
I’d have to move on to find out.
This entry was posted on Friday, December 26th, 2008 at 10:50 pm and is filed under Fiction Prose, Realistic Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.