When it’s cold out and too much to bear I think of the ways you’ve hurt me. It’s another half mile to the coffee shop and Santa Fe is coated in snow. The snow, although tall and towering, sinks when I press my body through it and I want very much for you to be that way.
A car swooshes by skidding on the ice. My boots seem to bring in the cold. I hear nothing but the car and the crunching of snow, and want so very, very much to hear from you.
At the coffee shop, there are others like me with nowhere to go and no reason for dull lives. People with enough money, enough family, but not enough spirit. I’ve been here for one week and it’s the same patrons daily. Santa Fe is an old city with old people and others so young they cannot be seen or counted on for any solace of having suffered.
At my table, I immediately want to leave and bury myself under layers of down. Not in the rental casita down the icy path but in a bed across the state, past highways, byways, and borders to Maine and to you. How can you make me so sad and wanting? The combination is like orange juice that curdles milk, and I get the sense everyone around me is curdling inside and has a no voice or words left.
When I desperately want to flee, I think of the night at the bar. When the seven-foot man dressed in drag scanned you up and down with hungry eyes and laughed at me saying I looked at you in a way you’d never look at me. He said much more and you said nothing. Didn’t take my hand, or look or flinch. I so wish you flinched.
Wrapping my hand around the hot coffee mug, it’s clear in my memories that you don’t think of me now, and I feel that like a cold wind.
Another sad spirit enters the café and the bell above the door twinkles and reminds me of stars and how I want to believe in tomorrow but hate the oncoming of day, which one must get through first. Somehow my time in Santa Fe passes and yet I move no closer to resolve over you. My father warned me about coming here; that it is no place for a woman in her thirties who still has a life to live.
The bell above the door chimes again, that twinkling, and once more. Then again. Chiming. I turn in annoyance and a homeless creature is opening and closing the door as if making music. At least I’m not like them.
My hard seat is suddenly soft, as giving as that bed across the country, and I hate that it takes crude comparison to help me see the light. I realize I’d never feel safe to tell you of my evil humanity, which is not the whole of me but admittedly part. I consider ordering a drink and burrito for the homeless man or woman but when I turn again the bell has silenced and they are gone. I look down the street beyond the windows and it’s as if the man or woman is buried under the snow. There are so many chamisa shrubs, rusty cars, and sculptures of Lady Guadalupe forming white mounds. I cannot bear the thought of people buried under a layer of cold, decidedly paralyzed as if hiding is the best choice.
I make up my mind that it’s not right to hide in shame and grief. Better to unbury, breathe the cold air, and spit hot breath back. The only defense against a world turned frigid. Breath; an act of defiance.
I finish my coffee and begin the walk back to the rental house. I shake trees and bushes and benches, making sure no one is buried beneath. They aren’t, and my fingers get cold and red like mice. I put them in my mouth and think Maine doesn’t sound so alluring anymore, but maybe somewhere farther north. Canada, Alaska, somewhere so cold that I become the warm center and believe in myself again.
Jahla Seppanen was born and raised off the grid in New Mexico. She has a degree in writing from Sarah Lawrence College in New York and her short stories have been published in journals like Fourteen Hills Review, Niche, Litro UK, The Cardiff Review, and others. She writes for a global advertising agency and her vices are tequila and running. Her work explores the pain and beauty of relationship dynamics between people in love.