The Implacable Order of Things
By Sarp Sozdinler
You strap your backpack and board the plane. Life feels bigger over the clouds, over the continents. Over the oceans gluing the two halves of you together.
You hop from one form of transportation to another until the hotel emerges large and white over the hills like the afternoon sun. The air carries a trace of salt and citrus, and for a moment you can’t tell whether this feels more like the beginning or end of something.
Every day, you take your morning constitutional even before the sun rises, along winding paths threading through the woods. Before seeing the faces of other guests, you see the faces of wild animals, whole new strands of species that have come together as if for your private leisure.
In the afternoon, you wander into town wearing sunglasses and your blue striped swimsuit, D.’s flowery towel rolled tightly in your backpack. Around and around you swim, diving over and under the rocks, and later fall asleep on the pier.
After you wake up, you take a note of the dream on your phone. You are busy taking sips from your coffee—not espresso, as both mean the same thing in this country, as D. warned you long ago. Writing has helped keep your thoughts more organized during your trip, and your emotions in check.
Keeping an account of your dreams is an idea D. gave you last August when you two spent the weekend away in that modest little summerhouse in Girona, sixty miles north of Barcelona, where she was from. Week after week, you have found yourself keeping up to your promise even though there’s no one around to hold you to it anymore.
One morning, you decide to change course and hop on the regional train to the next town over. The wagons are packed with tourists like you, smelling of stale sweat and saltwater. The broken English words boom abound, laced with loud drawls of fellow Americans. As the train paces through a dark tunnel, the name of the next stop shines big and red in the digital panel overhead, the missing parts of letters keeping things half-Italian, half-not.
Manarola resembles Girona in more ways than you would have liked, with an additional store here or a renovated pier there. You think of that gif D. sent you the last time you two were here, in which two identical Spider-Mans point at each other. Today, you are the only one who laughs out loud in that bakery that sells ciabattas with sour cream. The kind that tastes like salt and snot-laced tears.
Later, a young woman in a straw hat comes over to ask you if everything is all right, and you feel incapable of saying yes or no. She offers you a sip from her thermos of lukewarm water—and a smile after you say thank you.
You find a dirt road that meanders along vineyards and is supposed to take you back to the hotel if the woman’s map—or your memory of it—is to be trusted. Along the way, you pass by leafless trees and wooden benches sagging scandalously low due to longtime exposure to bad weather conditions. You sense there’s some poetry in there that you can well liken to your life, but your head throbs with pain and you cannot concentrate your thoughts however much you try.
Back at the hotel, you collapse into bed and sleep through the whole afternoon. By the time you wake up, the sun has vanished, leaving behind a sky streaked with shocks of gray and purple.
Later in the restaurant, you see the woman from Manarola sitting by herself at one of the round tables in the back. She’s carefully picking at the Brussels sprouts on her plate, chewing them ever more slowly with each bite. You consider whether you should go over and say hello. Thank her for her kindness. Introduce yourself.
You two go on a walk together the following morning, and you point at the spot you dive most days, where you once found the barnacles clung to the underside of a bank of mossy rocks. You tell her how rare it was to stumble upon that many of them in such a cramped space, that in fifty years there might even be no barnacles, or Cinque Terre, to speak of.
She listens to you with care each time, while you keep having walks for weeks to come, exploring all those hills together.
On your last morning there, you both stand at the overlook where the sea meets the cliffs. Though neither of you talks about what will come next, you feel you have come full circle in a way, like a tide returning to a familiar shore. She reaches into her bag and hands you a red pen, the same one she used to show you the way back to the hotel the first time you met. She rises on her tiptoes to plant a kiss on your cheek.
“For your travels,” she says, her voice stifled by the sounds of crashing waves.
THE END
Author Bio: Sarp Sozdinler is a writer from Philadelphia and Amsterdam. His stories and poems have been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, Wigleaf, Pithead Chapel, Flash Frog, Maudlin House, and Fractured Lit, among other journals. His work has been selected or nominated for anthologies including the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfiction. He edits the literary journal The Bulb Region. He can be found online @sarpsozdinler or at www.sarpsozdinler.com.