I am not a coffee drinker. I always ordered hot chocolate. I loved the sweet, soothing warmth of cocoa. An aftertaste that seemed to linger; to invite. Sometimes the drink burned my tongue. But I welcomed this consequence. I deserved it.
Sitting across from one another — his cold brew, my hot chocolate — we sat in the upper level. Our table. This became our daily ritual. During work breaks, we would walk down the block to the café, our pace steady along the Seattle sidewalk, rain-soaked and espresso-stained. I was grateful for his gait, the limp in his left leg that extended our walks, in defiance of what we lacked in currency of time. We talked of everything and nothing, once about our electric toothbrushes, how nice it would be to brush side by side at the same sink. I would not have predicted a favorite expression of love would be the thrilling possibility of shared dental hygiene.
There were intervals in which no words were exchanged at all. Silence is measured through absence, yet with him nothing was missing. What mattered was the present and not that we were star-crossed, or that I was black and he white, he an atheist and I Christian, he vegan while I decidedly not. It almost didn’t matter that we were each happily married.
After work, we would walk to transit. As my wild hair danced in the wind, the fingers of winter tugging at them, he and I would stare at one another, letting multiple trains or buses pass before finally parting. I would go home north, and he south. How fucking cinematic.
Before meeting this man, I had worn my virtue, my fidelity, as insignia. Now I found myself forced to eat my words, choking on my own sanctimony. He had never seen me naked, yet he had seen the very core of my being. He wanted to marry me within a month, and I him in the month that followed — but I was too afraid of what all that meant, of the people we’d hurt.
***
But what was I to do with this singular ache?
***
With springtime came layoffs. In his absence I faced the grotesque, a profound grief of which he was both cause and cure. If you have ever entertained even the possibility of a soulmate, of The One, allow me to nudge you just that much farther into credulity. I wished that multiverse theory might also be true, or reincarnation: in something, anything that meant a different world where there was another him, and another me, and they were together.
Depending on how much milk the barista pours in the hot chocolate, sometimes I think it is the color our child might have been, the daughter he and I talked about. I could see the blue of her eyes, startling against the whisper of brown in her skin — her mother’s offering. The daughter who would never exist. I had even named her: I would have called her Lark.
Image by Charles Postiaux on unsplash.com, licensed under CC 2.0.
- The Lark Never Flew - August 29, 2025