Grace

I met her at the park.

           Since quarantine started, I’d been going on evening walks. The park was usually empty, eerily silent but also peaceful without the usual scream of soccer whistles. Most of the time I would have the place to myself, an abyss of green fields, abandoned baseball diamonds, and a gravel trail through the dense woods. I would go around sunset and find myself marveling at the fiery sky as the sun sank into the horizon, coloring the clouds.

           It began as a solitary event, a way to clear my head in a world of chaos. I never would have thought that I would find someone else in this great abyss, especially someone I would fall in love with.

           I first saw her from a distance. I was walking one day under a dusky purple sky, the air warm and smelling like wildflowers. Out across a green expanse was a single figure standing. I squinted my eyes to see better and saw the shape of a woman, strands of long blonde hair rising in the warm breeze. I walked forward but kept my eyes on her, somewhat unable to look away. It’d been a while since I’d seen anyone. What surprised me the most here was the way she was standing in the middle of the field, her head raised to the sky.

           What was she doing?

           I was able to finally pull my eyes away as I crossed the bridge and went onto the shadowy trail through the woods. When I returned she was gone.

           Throughout the day, the image of her stayed in my mind; her head held up to the moving sky, her hair blowing in the breeze. I had no idea what she truly looked like, but even as I laid down in bed, I closed my eyes and saw that image as if plastered onto the insides of my eyelids.

           The next day, I didn’t see her. Even though I had told myself she wouldn’t be there a wave of subtle disappointment flooded me. I soon forgot about her, however, and she only came in flashes when I looked out across that green field and saw nothing but a hummingbird flitting past.

           I saw her again about six days after our first encounter. She was in the same spot, but this time she was sitting down, her hands palmed out on the ground behind as her as she leaned her head back to look at the sky. She turned and looked at me. For a moment we held each other’s gaze, which seemed nearly impossible considering how far we were from each other.

           Then she looked away and laid back into the grass.

           It was after this that I knew I’d see her again. There are some things you just feel with people, universal pulls that electrify you at rare points throughout life. You can feel it building like the water churning before it leaps off a waterfall. As I walked through the woods that day, I could feel something tight unwinding in my chest.

           I spoke to her the next day, after a hard, driving rain that seemed to bring everything to life. Wet grass and the damp, rotting husks of dead trees, the smell of the earth and rain mixing together to make something beautiful; this is how we first met.

           She was laying in the grass again. She had a peaceful, serene quality about her. She was wearing jeans. I stopped at about twenty feet from her.

           “Aren’t you getting wet?” I asked, which immediately I thought to be a strange first question.

           She glanced over at me. Her eyes were dark. “I don’t mind,” she said, smirking.

           There was something odd about looking at her. It was like a feeling of déjà vu. Like meeting an old friend.

           “I’ve seen you here before,” she said. “I saw you the other day, walking over there.”

           “I saw you too.”

           “Are you spying on me?”

           “No!” I replied defensively. “We’re the only two people in this park. I was curious.”

           In the distance, thunder rumbled, and dark, oppressive clouds moved overhead.

           “It’s going to rain,” she said.

           “I’m Tom,” I said, rather awkwardly.

           She looked at me again with those dark, intimidating eyes. “Tom,” she said, and smiled for the first time. “I’m Grace.”

           “Grace,” I said, and smiled back at her.

           We found two benches about ten feet apart and sat there talking for probably about three hours. Time felt like it had melted away and ceased to exist. It’s hard for me even to remember what our conversation revolved around. I do know we soon came to talk about personal things – people we’ve lost, people we’ve loved, people we wish we would’ve kept in contact with. It was a strange, amazing conversation that seemed like some kind of fantastic turning point in my life. She was a stranger, but at that moment, it felt as though I’d known her my whole life.

           Soon the clouds pressed together, and warm rain fell on us. It was as though we didn’t feel it. We laughed and raised our heads to the sky, letting the rain run across our faces and tasting it on our tongues.

           It began to get dark.

           “I should get home,” Grace said, standing up. “Will you be here tomorrow?”

           “Yes,” I told her, and I watched her walk away into the gathering darkness.

           Walking home felt as though I was walking away from some distant dream. I felt light, and my whole body felt released, as though I’d let out a breath I’d been holding in for twenty years.

           That first meeting was what I remember most, with the sweet, warm rain falling on us and the air smelling like rotting trees and looking at her dark eyes. The exact words we said are lost on me. Only the feeling remains, the abstract senses that piece it together. Sometimes I wish I had the whole thing in my mind so I could rewind and watch it back like a movie. But maybe that would ruin it. Having memories imprinted by smells, by sight, instead of all of it exactly how it happened - perhaps this is even realer and sweeter than the original.

           We continued to meet on those same two benches, talking and laughing and watching the sunsets together. I’d never been able to speak to anyone the way I spoke to her. My soul seemed to spill out into her lap. Our conversations were always full, always shifting and evolving and never boring. Sometimes our words would die off and we would just listen to the birds or a faraway owl or the gentle breeze winding through the trees.

           I often wondered what would happen if the ten feet between our benches didn’t exist. What would happen? It seemed as though the tension grew with each meeting, and the distance seemed longer and more irrelevant with each conversation. Each time I wanted to cross it, to break the gap and kiss her.

           We often talked into the dark. She was always the first to get up and leave, it shouldn’t have surprised me what happened later.

           I’m not sure how many times we met. Twenty, perhaps, give or take. One day I went to find her on our benches and she wasn’t there. I sat and waited, watching the sky turn and listening to the wind and the birds, and she never came. Night dropped and darkness surrounded me and still, she didn’t come. The next day, the same thing.

It’s been ten days since I last saw her. I figure our short, beautiful romance is probably lost somewhere in that park, surviving in my mind, never to be forgotten. I haven’t lost faith that I’ll see her again, maybe when all this is over, when life returns back to some kind of normalcy and we can go on a proper date, a date where the ten feet doesn’t exist.

           I still wait for her every night on our bench, and when it rains I sit and I lift my head up to the sky, tasting the rain on my tongue.