Soliloquies Anthology 30.1

That summer, everything ripened too fast. Apricots bruised on the branches, strawberries sank into themselves like they were tired of being beautiful, and peaches, heady and over-sweet, split down the middle in your hands. The air in the bay was syrupy, heavy with heat and rust from salt air. Tucked away like a quiet alcove on a narrow Pacific inlet, the bay curved gently against the coastline, hemmed in by dense cedar forests and low, mist-laced hills. It spanned just ten kilometers from end to end, small enough that everyone knew each other’s dogs, secrets, and favorite brand of coffee. The water was calm most days, a glassy sheet that mirrored the shifting sky, and in the early mornings, the fog rolled in thick and slow, swallowing the boardwalk and softening the sharp edges of the world. 

It was the only town I’d ever lived in–more like a cradle than a place. The heat made everything feel closer than it was. It was July, and the walls of my studio were sweating, the fan in the corner doing little more than moving the hot air around. My thighs stuck to the vinyl of my kitchen chair while I peeled a too-squishy orange over the sink, juice dripping down to my elbow in a way that made me miss winter. 

The bay in summer always felt unhinged. People stayed out too late, laughed too loud, talked to strangers they’d never noticed in November. I was twenty-two this summer. It wasn’t old, but it wasn’t young enough to be spending my summer lounging in the sun with a book and not feel guilty about it. 

I worked part-time at a bookstore that sold more candles than books, and I’d become decent at pretending to care about what other people read. I smiled politely when someone mentioned a Didion book that changed their life–that I “just have to read!” –and I gave an encouraging nod accompanied by a “good choice” when someone brought to the register a stack of Colleen Hoover with a Kafka carefully placed on top. I wanted to tell them that no one actually cared what you’re reading these days. 

Most days after work, I walked home through the orchards to avoid the main road. It was quieter there, and I liked the way the fruits held the heat, as if they were storing it for later. I first saw her as the fruits started to ripen. Every evening, around six, she sprawled beneath the fruits, drinking a soda and absorbing the heat as if it were an art. She was older than me, maybe forty, barefoot, usually in a slip dress with little plum stains lining the bottom. Not beautiful in the way people mean, but striking. She looked like she had opinions about things. She never waved. Just nodded. I nodded back. That was our entire exchange. But I started going out of my way to pass her. I don’t know why, exactly. There was something about her I was drawn to–not sexually or romantically. She looked… unbothered. And that was the kind of person I was so desperately trying to become.

I told Yasmin about her during one of our late-night balcony beers. Yasmin was one of my few friends in the bay. At twenty-three years old, she worked in a bank by choice. When she wasn’t in the bank, Yasmin was writing loads of poetry that she would never let anyone read though she swore, if she published them, she would have a Mary Oliver level of success. 

“You always fall in love with weird people you don’t know,” she said, handing me another cheap balcony beer. “It’s your thing.”

“I’m not in love.”

“I didn’t say it was romantic. You fall in lust with their lives.”

I sipped my beer and shrugged. “Maybe I’m just bored.”

Yasmin leaned back and closed her eyes. “Boredom is just fuel.”

Suddenly, I was glad she kept her poems to herself.

One evening in late August, the woman wasn’t there. Just an empty patch beneath a fig tree and a glass bottle tipped on its side, the soda gone flat in the heat. I stood for a while at the edge of the orchard, uncertain whether to keep walking or wait. The grass still held the shape of her, faintly pressed down like a shadow. That night, the air turned. Not cold, exactly, but cooler, like the season had exhaled.

The next day, I told Yasmin that I hadn’t seen the woman.
“She probably just got bored,” she said, like that settled it.

I nodded, but something in me tugged at the idea that maybe it wasn’t boredom at all, just time. Things ripened until they couldn’t. You don’t always get to be there for the moment they fall from the branch. The orchard started to empty out after that. The fruits left behind were bird-bitten, sagging. Even the air seemed thinner, as if the summer had stretched too far and was beginning to unravel. At the bookstore, back-to-school orders replaced summer reads. Candles switched from citrus to cinnamon. I spent more time inside, peeling apples instead of oranges and counting how many jackets I could wear before turning the heat on. 

Yasmin moved to Vancouver that fall. Said she needed more “grit” in her life, like she was shopping for exfoliants. She left me her plant and a box of poems she still wouldn’t let me read. “Maybe one day,” she said, hugging me at the ferry terminal, already looking over my shoulder at the water. The bay got quiet again. Less like a cradle, more like a held breath. But sometimes, I still walked the orchard path after work, out of habit or hope, I wasn’t sure. I passed the fig tree, now bare and grey-limbed, and thought about how some people leave without leaving anything behind, and others managed to haunt you with nothing more than a nod. 

I think about that summer more than I mean to. The overripe fruits, the syrupy air, the sense that something was just about to happen–even if it never did. Maybe that’s what it means to be twenty: to confuse ache for momentum. To fall in lust with other people’s stillness. To search for meaning in small gestures, not because they are significant, but because you are.

And then, one day, you notice you’re not quite the same. Not wildly different. Just… riper. Softer in some places. A little more willing to bruise.