At home, summer smelled like the night breeze - campfire smoke, herbs she knew but couldn’t name, and the promise of rain - when it gently billowed the flap of the sturdy old tent she and Will would pitch beneath a sky wide and black and flecked with stars. 

It felt like the soft swaying of her hammock in the shade as she hummed a song with no melody and gently dug her fingers into the cool earth, like thin white sheets on the hottest night in August and the comfort of knowing that a faithful dog lay at her feet dreaming in black and white. 

Yes, it tasted like apples picked from the lone, thriving tree in the old wheat field, crisp and sun warmed; like Suncrest peaches snuck from the bushels and bushels meant for canning, round and red-gold, each furtive bite dripping and sweet; like custard, so thick it wouldn’t slide off a slick spoon, laden with wild berries and cool mint.

She tries to write these details down in the hope that they will feel closer, more real, but the words are empty and imperfect. Unable to tell even her own story, she feels farther away from that life than she already is. Rising from her little desk in the cramped apartment she shares with a cat and the rats it was too old to kill, she shuts off the light. She lies face down on her bed and sweats and sighs but doesn’t sleep.

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

I always laughed at that quote, and at Hemingway. “Know why he killed himself? Read one of his own books” - I say it jokingly, but a small part of me truly believes it. There are times I read my own words and wish heartily for the courage to throw myself off the balcony.

But maybe he was right. The words came faster when I cut myself. 

I would totally write this little scenario out if it were possible for me to stop squealing and giggling over it. 

The fifth stone left his hand and skipped across the surface of the water, tearing holes in the liquid carpet of algae along the way. As it sank and the ripples spread, he gulped down more whiskey. It had been an hour, at least. Surely she would understand what his absence meant. Surely she had known when she first asked him to sit down at that table draped in golden cloth and laden with foods too rich to stomach that he couldn’t do it. They would never approve of the swamp rat that had somehow gotten its dirty claws on their precious cultured pearl.

Out of necessity, he had learned how to swallow his pride years ago, but the venture had always proved worth the humiliation. Why would he endure the looks down their refined noses at him, the awkward silences, if it would only end with refusal, rejection, despair? Better to have a sense of agency over the death of his happiness.

He drank more and exhaled; his breath was warm and heavy with liquor. “How did this happen?” A stupid question, the answer to which drove him to another great gulp.

He was smart - smart enough to take the bus to the magnet school in town, smart enough for a scholarship to Tulane, smart enough for the brightest minds in the field to want to nurture his talent like an exotic flower - but not smart enough to love someone for whom a happy ending with him was possible. He was smart and handsome with a smile like a red dying star and a voice like sweet, dark syrup. Still, he would never be smart enough or handsome enough or charming enough to compensate for that dirty Cajun tinge he could not completely banish from his speech. He had certainly tried, though, and to someone who’d never heard a bayou boy speak, he could pass as New Orleans uppercrust. But drinking made his tongue thick and sloppy, and now he tromped bitterly through the words he had learned to handle like glass butterflies.

“You got your fancy degree and prettied-up talkin’. For all dat shit, you still got callouses dat’ll never go away, you’ll smell like de swamp and welfare checks forever. You’re still just a grimy swamp boy, and ballerinas wid roses in dere cheeks don’ fall in love wid grimy swamp boys.”

She had loved the way he called her cher - pronounced like “sha,” the Cajun way - in the quietest of tender moments. She had loved his smell, his touch, the perfect brace of his arms and his shoulders and the hollow of his neck. She had loved how every Friday he met her outside the studio, took her duffel bag with a kiss on the forehead and an arm around her waist but no words, none at all.

But she hadn’t loved him.

“She never loved you.” He told himself this because if he didn’t he just might run to her, beg forgiveness, try to scrape together the ruins of what had been so, so good, but wasn’t meant to last. 

He rubbed his furrowed brow where a dull, sorrowful ache had begun to build. He watched the fireflies blink in the balmy blue night and shook his head. 

“S’better dis way,” he murmured. Even the crickets were silent.