Sirens, some of the best meals of my life have been accidents. Most of the best, Everythings, have been spontaneous, as I reflect. The name he had declined via text was not a promise but a postponement. I knew that.
But here is something I have learned about going where you have not gone before: the purpose of an adventure is not to pack your regular life into a smaller suitcase and take it with you. You go to leave things behind. Go where you haven’t gone before. Bring only the version of yourself you’d most like to meet.
I dressed for dinner the way a woman dresses when she is dressing for herself and leaving room for the possibility of an audience.
The restaurant was the kind that requires reservations only from people who have never been, has no sign and requires a walk down a staircase cut directly into a cliff face. I asked the concierge and he’d hesitated in the way people do before telling you the best things. Chalkboard menu, but don’t bother. What the chef prepared is what you will wish to have. Shadowed tables. Candles in glass. The sea immediately, massively present below. And yes, he was already there.
Of course he was. In the pale linen jacket of a man who had packed with intention.
We ate the way conversations eat time — deliberately, embracing flavours and textures without hesitation or notice. He had spent years in a city I love and three years in a country I had been meaning to visit and one terrible winter somewhere I’d never heard of, and he talked about all of it the way interesting people talk about their lives: not performing, just remembering.
The memories are the trip, Beautifuls. The trip is just the excuse to make them.
But here’s what I want to tell you, Mavens. Between the first course and the third, the conversation moved the way it only moves with a stranger you will not be strange to for much longer. A temporary stranger. And I found myself thinking — this is the thing. Not the table. Not the view. Not even him, precisely, though he was very much a contributing factor.
This. The feeling of being entirely present. The particular quality of a night that exists only in this sequence, only for these hours, only because you came alone and left the door open to whatever was next.
I had been on trips before that I’d shared someone else’s version of adventure. And they were lovely, some of them. But there is a flavor of experience that only happens when you are the one who decides everything. You feel it like sun on skin that hasn’t been outside in a long time.
We walked back along the cliff path in the dark. The sea was doing something theatrical below, the way the sea always does when there is something it wants you to remember. He stopped once to show me a star he was particularly fond of. I stood close to look. I wondered aloud what might happen if the waves ever surprised us and began to crash in a pattern that we could follow instead of a pattern that appeared random but clearly was not. All of the world strains in vain to find the pattern that perhaps repeated once in our lifetime…but what if??
We agreed, the world would be on the brink if that ever happened. And then, I kissed him. And he kissed back. He tasted like the heady port he had picked when I ordered a final dram of peaty scotch. The fusion of flavours, was intoxicating.
At the path that split toward our respective rooms, we paused.
“It’s good to see you again. I am surprised to see you still travel alone.
Surprised, and very pleased.”
“There are things that never change.” I said. “And possibilities that will always beckon. The horizon is endless.”
Yes, I walked to my room alone, which is not the same, Darlings, as going home empty-handed. He had handed me a card. Both numbers. Room and phone. Handwritten, with the sure stroke of a fountain pen. Which means he had written it before our evening had even begun.
I have no wish to destroy a tantalizing question that is so perfect. Answering the question of which I might- or might not- have used would only disrupt the chapter.
The light on my phone was blinking.
Two messages. Two names. Two other stories not yet finished.
And me, standing in my beautiful room, in the warm humid dark of somewhere I had never been before — deciding, with exquisite patience, which- if any- door to open first.
