Spring Will Be Here Soon

“I can understand why someone would want to be friends with me.” She looked at the stone in her hand, turned it over once, twice with her thumb and her fingers. “What I don’t understand is why someone would love me. Fall in love with me, I mean.”

She threw the stone as hard as she could. It flew through the air and landed with a splash, sending ripples across the surface of the lake.

The two sat on a bench. It was an old bench. The boards bent when the girl shifted in her seat, creaked against her weight. The plaque on the front said someone used to sit here to feed the ducks. It said they did that until they died. There were no ducks now, hadn’t been for a few months. It was just the lake and the rocks and the chill in the air.

The ripples in the lake grew, traveled faster and faster until the widest ring hit the edge, lapped the shore near their feet with a gasp.

The other woman smiled. “You don’t believe that,” she said.

“It’s true,” said the girl.

The woman crossed one knee over the other, folded her hands on top. The polish on her nails glimmered with a blue so soft it could have been the sky itself. “You were loved,” she said. “For five years, you were loved.”

The girl had nothing to say to that. Was she? Loved?

The woman shrugged her coat closer against the cold. It was the big and furry kind, and white as her skin. She probably didn’t need the coat. Probably couldn’t even feel cold. Old habits died hard, the girl supposed.

“You’re wondering if it was real,” said the woman. It wasn’t a question.

The girl didn’t answer, but she did bend down to pick up another stone. She reached between her boots, which were black as night, and grabbed one the size of her palm. It was icy from sitting in the frosty ground for too long.

“Yes. I am,” she said, before throwing it. She threw it harder than the last and when it landed, the splash was really more of a thunk and it was loud enough to spook a bird from its perch on a nearby bush.

The woman sighed, breathing white plumes into the air. “Was it real to you?”

“To my knowledge.”

The woman looked at her, intrigued. “What does that mean?”

“It means I did my best in the only way I knew how,” said the girl.

“Well, that’s strange.”

The girl paused, raised a brow.

“Strange way of thinking about it, I mean. It’s not about knowing, it’s about feeling. This isn’t the sort of test you can study for. It’s not a test at all. It’s life.”

The girl looked out at the lake. She could still see where her last stone landed if she looked closely at the ripples, which were the size of clouds now and fading just as fast. “It’s the only way I know how to…” she gestured vaguely to the world around her, “…how to do anything.”

The woman gave her a quick sort of smile, there and then gone. “Be a lot easier if it were like that. Wouldn’t it?"

The girl laughed, short and bitter. “I kind of thought it was.”

The woman lifted her hand, rotated it in the air. By the time it had done one full turn, there was a glass in her hand, cone shaped and filled with something the color of burnt amber.

“Martini?” asked the girl.

“Manhattan,” said the woman. “Martinis are made with gin, love.”

The girl gave her a blank stare.

“Gin is clear,” said the woman, giving the glass a little shake. The girl nodded and the woman sipped, grimacing against the bite of the drink. She offered the glass to the girl, who shook her head.

“I don’t know how you can drink that stuff,” she said.

The woman took another sip, smacked her lips. “Me either.” She looked into the glass, swirled it once. “If I’m honest, I think at some point we forgot to do things for the pleasure of them. We started to crave the pain, the bitter. The ugliness of it all.” She downed the glass in one fell swoop. When her hand returned to her lap, it was empty once more. She breathed out through her nose, long and deep, and the tang of vermouth and cherries filled the air.

The two fell into a sort of unbalanced silence. The kind where one person held more in their heart than the other, but the other was smart enough not to pry.

“Spring will be here soon,” said the woman, dreamily. She turned to the girl, whose eyes were fixed on the spot where she had thrown the rock. “What’s next for you?” she asked.

The girl shrugged. “I don’t know. Nothing.” She looked down at her hands. “Or, anything, I guess.”

“That’s the spirit,” she said.

But the “nothing” sat in her stomach like a lead weight. And the “anything” felt less like freedom and more like an abyss. Deep and dark and full of places to get lost.

“You’re getting that look again.”

“What look?”

The woman rolled her eyes. “You know what look.”

The girl rolled her shoulders like she was shrugging off a coat (or cobwebs or an unwanted hug) and the woman leaned to the side so her mouth was by the girl’s ear.

“You are going to be fine.”

“I know,” said the girl. Then, “I know,” more quietly.

The surface of the lake was still again and her fingers twitched, missing the weight of a stone in them. “How do you,” she said before she lost her nerve, “How do you keep going?”

“Ah, Beautiful,” said the woman. She rose, her long furry coat falling like autumn leaves around her, pooling at her feet. She smiled, held out her hand for the girl to take. “You simply do.”

The girl looked at the woman’s hand, wanting to take it but feeling unsure. The lead weight – the “nothing” – growled in her stomach, anchored her to the old bench, the one without ducks.

“Come on, love,” said the woman, wiggling her fingers. “Spring will be here soon.”