People We Meet on Vacation

OUR LAST NIGHT on Sanibel Island, I lie awake, listening to the rain thrum against the roof, replaying the week as if watching through a sheen that’s thick and hazy and ever rippling, trying to capture this one split second that seems to wink out of view every time I reach for it.Text content © NôvelDrama.Org.

I see the stormy beaches. The Twilight Zone marathon Alex and I snooze through on the couch. The seafood place where he’d finally given me the grisly details of his and Sarah’s breakup—that she’d told him their relationship was about as exciting as the library where they’d met, before dumping him and leaving for a three-week yoga retreat. If she wants excitement, I’d said, I’m happy to key her car. My memory skips forward, to the bar called BAR, with its sticky floors and thatched fans, where I step out of the bathroom and see him at the bar, reading a book, and feel so much love I could split open, and how after I tried to jar him from his post-Sarah sadness with an over-the-top “Hey, tiger!”

Then there comes the moment that we ran through the downpour from BAR to our car, the ones spent listening to the windshield wipers squeak across the glass as we sliced through the torrential rain back to our rain-soaked bungalow.

I’m getting closer to that moment, that one I keep reaching for and coming up empty-handed, as if it were nothing but a bit of reflected light, dancing on the floor.

I see Alex asking to take a picture together, surprising me with the flash on the count of two instead of three. The both of us choking over laughter, moaning at the heinousness of our picture, arguing whether to delete it, Alex promising I don’t look anything like that, me telling him the same.

Then he says, “Next year let’s go somewhere cold.”

I say okay, that we will.

And here it comes, the moment that keeps slipping through my fingers, like it’s the game-changing detail in an instant replay I can’t seem to pause or slow down.

We are just looking at each other. There are no hard edges to grab hold of, no distinct markers on this moment’s beginning or end, nothing to separate it from the millions just like it.

But this, this is the moment I first think it.

I am in love with you.

The thought is terrifying, probably not even true. A dangerous idea to entertain. I release my hold on it, watch it slip away.

But there are points in the center of my palms that burn, scorched, proof I once held it there.