This will be another first for me: a story set in the present! It'll be the first in a new relaxed voice, as well, more in line with my normal speech. That may be good or bad. You shall be the judge! I dig this one. It made me happy to write, which is odd and unfamiliar to me. Please, give me love, hate, and comments! Tell me what you think, and enjoy, if you can.
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She was a UCO; an unidentified cycling object. At the time, I just thought she was a really hot girl.
I was making the right out of the Walmart parking lot when I saw her. Dark brown skin, even darker hair, a sleeveless shirt that displayed her impressive bicep muscles and shorts that showed the same tone in her long legs above her boots. She was standing up on her pedals, riding down the oncoming lane while she took lazy glances my way to appraise her crossing. A cigarette hung from her lips, content to expend itself in due time while its smoker focused. Round, dark sunglasses covered her eyes and prevented me from studying any other feature of her face. So engrossed was I in staring at the hot girl making her way across the road, that I almost drove into her! I slammed on the brakes and made some hand gesture to communicate that I was a fucking idiot and that I was sorry. She only stared through her glasses and took a puff of her cig, leaving behind a cloud of smoke as if to mask her escape across the other lane. A honk from behind returned me to earth and my eyes to the road ahead from the back of the girl as she pedaled down the sidewalk into her own world that had nearly collided with my own.
The Earth, or the town, rather, is small, in the grand scheme of things, so it was inevitable that our courses would intersect again. How soon I would see her again, I had no idea. That I would speak to her, not even my bedtime thoughts fixed upon her that night could imagine. I had no idea that my life would be forever changed by a girl literally out of this world. A fucking idiot, remember?
It was two months before I saw her again.
Other women spotted about my mundane, infrequent errands about the town gave concert in my lonely, pathetic mind. The Cycling Smoker did make appearances on occasion but she starred in no fantasies. The encounter always replayed in my mind's eye, and I would attempt to look closer, to recall any other detail about her that I may have missed. Nothing additional emerged, though. I would sigh and move on to a girl more recently encountered; some cashier or woman I'd spotted at a beach. A creepy fucking idiot, I know. I'd soothe myself as a relentless romantic, a true roving libra, but my eyes have always sought and captured strangers to fall in love with later within the lair of my mind. I'd always been a hermit, too. The pandemic only sealed my fate as a lonely, unwieldy watcher. I joked with myself that I was akin to a sailor stuck at sea for years and years before seeing a woman again like I did in town. Looking is not enough, of course, so up on my hill I'd yearn my days and dream my nights away.
You'd assume I was living large on a hill from how casually I let it slip, but I was anything but. The price would deceive you as well, but the place was a fucking dump. In the hills near the town, I dwelt on the bottom floor of a bizarre house owned by this old woman, a Hollywood fashion designer if you were fool enough to believe her. The floor was concrete, and the walls pissed bugs when I moved in, there weren't enough wall sockets, and everything was just
odd.
The doors didn't seal against the floor, so bugs --which the old lady insisted she had never seen before in twenty years of living in the dump-- would crawl in at night. The shower was just big enough for one and possessed no even edge. There was no internet access but my phone's LTE.
The property was isolated, and that was all that I had desired, but I soon realized that may have been detrimental to my mind. No peace did I find there. The old lady's chickens made the worst noises I had ever heard, and after years of being spoiled by the lady's handouts from her doorstep they were obliged to frequent it when it became my doorstep. The tenants upstairs did not last. The first got drunk and shot guns in the night. The second hadn't even moved in before she was evicted for destroying a "priceless" chandelier made of chicken wire. The old lady was the worst of all the sources of noise. I put up with them all but she quickly eroded my nerves before even half the lease was up. And there she was, that day, on my way out the door.
"Roman! Hello. I wanted to tell you... uh... that uh... the the... guy, Victor, is coming today to uh... build! He is coming to build uh, the coop, over there!" She gestured widely to the side of the house but I didn't look.
"Alright, Bernardine."
"Yes, alright. Okay, alright. Oh, you're going?"
"Yeah."
"Oh." She turned back after starting to move away. "Later, I am going to water the pear trees, and I have to block the gate so noone drives over the hose. You know old hoses? If someone drives over it, it uh... cracks, and makes holes. Okay, alright. See you."
"Alright."
This probably doesn't seem that bad, but she would do this almost everyday, multiple times a day. Her exclaiming my name quickly began to trigger a primal response within me of revulsion and anxiety. She would come to my doorstep and ramble on about something going on on her farm that impacted me not at all and then go on into some story. I had started acting even more withdrawn than usual to put her off from bothering me but it had shown little sign of sinking in for her. I didn't know how I was going to last the rest of my lease. She was the only social interaction I got and I couldn't even stand it. I had taken to my old tactics from living back home: spending the day elsewhere.
I got in my car and threw my towel into the other seat. Down the dirt road I drove, imagining myself a country boy in some real rural place and not some desolate California hills. On the road, I felt at home. It was my own little world, and it went with me wherever I moved or fled or lived. The air could be cool or warm, whatever I desired, and I could listen to whatever I wanted at any volume and only I would hear. Just driving to the beach relaxed me. Anticipation was always the chief source of joy in things I desired. I drove down winding roads that were bordered by forest or ravine and saw true nature, relative to the road, and not the artificial ecosystem the old lady created with her chickens and goats and rabbits that existed only to be fed. Things actually died out here, though it was mainly our cars that did the killing.
I arrived and paid the fee. An old me, that is, a younger me, would be aghast to pay ten dollars to park somewhere but I was just starting to teach myself that it was alright to spend money on things. It was the end of summer, and an early hour, but still the sun shone down proudly on us all who were there to beat the normal people who came after noon. I took off my shoes and socks and my pants to bare my feet and legs save my trunks but left my shirt on, to observe beach ceremony and remove it only when my towel was laid out. I walked onto the beach and set my things down and turned my back to the ocean, as if ashamed to show the sea the belly I'd been working on. I sunscreened myself up, the pale thing I was. The waves whooshed and crashed behind me, as if the water was assuring me it thought no different of me than when I had visited it back down in San Diego.
I turned back to face the beach, ready to present myself. No matter how many times I see it, and wherever I do see it, the end of the world where the blue ocean's edge meets the bluer horizon in that rare straight line in nature awes me. The sound of the waves, its subtle power expressed in retraction and crashing water isolates the world around you to just the beach. The sand underfoot was the softest stuff my toes have ever felt. I stepped forward single-mindedly to the line where damp sand met the dry, as the tide was pulled back like a siren into her lover's arms. I stood and waited for it to return and baptize my toes with water that would remind me of what cold really felt like. The sea sighed itself back, effortlessly, tremendously. The water made me gasp it was so cold and genuine feeling. I pressed on until my ankles were submerged. The tide was called back again and I closed my eyes. The borderland of wet sand was carried away by the tide and it felt like the world around me was being pulled away by a powerful star's gravity. The sand underfoot dissolved faster and faster and I wobbled, feeling weightless, like I was falling, like the earth below me was moving under my feet. I withstood the power of the sea. The tide receded again and released me to enjoy what the beach had to offer.
I walked down the shore aways and splashed around and all the other things one does at the water's edge who doesn't want to go in and bear the true cold. Others went in farther down the shore and shrieked at the surely overpowering sensation. I stared out at the horizon a bit longer before deciding to return to my towel. My eyes wandered on the walk back, as they are wont to do on a beach. To the left I saw a family eating burgers from a big carton, a couple giggling beside them, and to the right, an appropriate distance away from my towel, was a girl with dark brown skin and even darker black hair sitting on her own. She still wore her shades and a cigarette, and filled out a lime green bikini that made me look away. She stared out at the horizon just like how she had stared through me after our near miss. I sat down as nonchalantly as I could manage, relieved she seemed not to have noticed me. I should have been grateful, I knew, and spent the rest of my time there on my back with my eyes closed, but I couldn't help myself.
