It Was Never Your Wave

If I knew, I could have counted the seconds. The air moved, a napkin slipped from the table. It had not even finished its pointless drifting, and she was gone. Bobby B.’s cat would not have cared to jump on the bench. No heat left there. Not even an indentation on the cushion. While on my chest — a bubbling void, a spreading darkness that shut the café down. Flip the storefront sign, Bobby. Reality must match feeling.

You’re like a balloon that floated away from a child’s hand, she said, when I showed up at her apartment on a Saturday. So grasp me tight? Days later, I came back with a gift: a magnetic levitating globe. To stop me from floating away, I said. That’s so cheesy, she laughed, picking up the globe and locking it in a drawer. You only lock what is sacred. Or maybe shameful. Or wrong.

She could not believe I was happy assembling and fixing bikes. Time is not of the same value for everyone, I would defend myself, sort of. Meaning that I was content belittling my life? Doing something small and good and consistent was larger, in the end, than aspiring for greatness and failing all the way. She took offense. Law school is not great. Why did she do it then? Thoughts like cartoon bubbles, complexity crushed into colorful, candy-shaped concepts.

Devil’s Beach is where we met. A narrow, liquid tongue between two rocks, curling waves that harbor no good intentions. Surf wise, surf fair, at least. When her brother turned for a cutback, I was standing, quicker, whistling, boasting my priority. He threw himself onto the shattered, rushing wave. Overshot it. Cracked his head on the rocks. Blood on Devil’s Beach, unraveling like ribbons in the foam. Tears on the sand, dripping, dripping, a distressed compass lost to sirens that never arrive. No death though. Some stitches in the hospital. Love in the waiting room. Not my fault, I said to her first. Not my fault, I said to him after.

How often the cynical are really the naïve. Guys fist bumping me along Lighthouse Road, calls in which I talked in single words, endless pints and champagne in any given pub, pretty dresses and little boxes of jewelry that I produced every week. I was mute, she clueless. Accused of things so shallow, I played along. Such a beautiful spectacle it was, if we had been careful. But someone half sharp always cuts more than due. Nothing truly delicate survives a yearning for resolution.

Studying her law books and dog-earing the pages out of boredom. Looking at me intensely when someone she knew and disliked entered the café, as if I could somehow hide her in plain sight. Collecting her hair for a ponytail or, even better, for a bun, with sudden exasperation. Saying I don’t know to fill the silence, not explaining and not needing to. Asking Bobby B. for a chai latte and letting it go cold on the table, because she just wanted something small to happen. Happiness dispensed in little scenes — couldn't we just enjoy them?

You try to improve for someone, while you are with someone, but it is not enough. They always want the side of you that they cannot see. Am I the same there? Surprise, I am not. Life sliced, unevenly: part good, part rotten. Give it some time. Change must start somewhere. But time has a different value for her. No patience for small increments. All now or all then. She does not believe in the shifty in-between.

A final attempt to say I’m sorry, to make me whole. She comes, drops a brown bag on the counter, flees. Now I’m all bad. What I could become vanishes before the napkin lands on the floor. Bobby B. whistles. He knows. He knows me from back then and knows my future. I can’t stand this, I’m never coming back. I open the bag on the street. An empty, scarlet balloon tied to my magnetic globe. It says — It was never your wave.

BIO: Ricardo Bernhard is the author of four novels. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Your Impossible Voice, Litbreak Magazine, Right Hand Pointing, and Neon Origami. He is based in South Africa.