This story was originally written in March, 2020 for “Photographic Prose,” a collaborative triptych series w/ that explored the relationship between photography, narrative & our own deepening connection. You can read Part I1 and Part III2 down below.
Six months after I wrote this story, Augusta & I travelled to the cottage in Bailey Island together.
1/6
You’re hiding out from a cold rain inside a coffee shop in North West London. Your current address is cryptic—NW5 4SA—and so you order a hot chocolate to feel closer to home but the powdered chocolate only makes you feel further away.
You start to scratch at your beard like you do when you’re nervous. You empathize with the other patrons—so many humans eating alone—and you feel particularly sympathetic to the man ordering a coffee with a lisp just as Bill Evans’ Live at the Village Vanguard starts playing on the speakers.
You have a vision of that sofa in front of the cast iron fireplace, and when you close your eyes you can still hear the beach waves and taste the sea salt and smell the earth after that first night of heavy rains—petrichor.
The rain didn’t let up that first night when you pulled up to curb at Portland International Jetport. The red break lights shimmered in front of you while you waited, and as you sat in the driver’s seat you remember being afraid that you’d forgotten how to kiss. That was when you saw him waving at you from the curb. You got out of the car and hugged him but didn’t kiss, and because you were nervous you tried to make small-talk on the curb until he laughed and put his hand on your shoulder and said, “You’re just as I remember you. Maybe we can talk in the car, out of the rain?”
2/6
The rain patter on the car’s metallic roof calmed your nerves as you navigated the traffic leading towards the inundated interstate. You remember thinking you were crazy to invite him to the cottage in the first place: it’d been three years since you left and you hadn’t met anyone since, and now you’d gone and invited him back to where it all began at the edge of the continent on Bailey Island, Maine.
You were so timid in the driver’s seat, shifting gears too early most of the way, making the car wheeze when you down-shifted as he told you about his new life in Europe. He had so many new stories about where he’d been and what he’d done, and sitting there, listening to his adventures, you were embarrassed when he asked how you’d been the past three years because the truth was you didn’t have anything to say—you’d spent them still in love.
3/6
Few experiences in life compare to a Nor’easter. You gripped the steering wheel tight crossing the bridge into Yarmouth. You never liked driving so close to the edge, so close to the idea that an iron railing was your only protection. It was raining so hard that night. When the windshield wipers couldn’t keep up with the downpour, you pulled into a gas station in Freeport to wait out the worst of the storm.
He bought you a Ginger Ale and a Snickers at the too-brightly lit gas station and you remember wanting to kiss him but instead you made a bad pun about the rain. You could feel him staring at you while you returned to focusing on the road and you remember feeling his gaze and looking out the driver-side window so he wouldn’t see you smile.
Through sheets of rain you felt him put his left hand on your right thigh as you reached the first of many bridges heading towards the many islands in Casco Bay. He didn’t let go the rest of the way.
4/6
There was a bad car accident outside of Brunswick, on Route 24, and you remember how playful the ambulance lights seemed, the red and blue swirling and shimmering on the saturated concrete. You didn’t look at the wreckage when you rolled past the accident; he squeezed your leg tight when the fire truck came screaming by on the narrow causeway. The rain let up once you reached Safe Harbor Island and it finally felt safe enough to put on an album.
As the trumpet began playing you asked, “Who is this again?” He giggled. “Don’t you remember?” he said. “That’s Miles. But I think Bill Evans makes the album. Somebody once said his playing is like the longest suicide-note ever written.”
You looked over at him and saw a flicker of the same darkness that had begun to consume you when you left him. He was so handsome—he reminded you of Frank Sinatra, or Bobby Darin, of that bygone era when the highest virtue for a man was to be a gentleman.
The album came to an end as you crossed the bridge onto Bailey Island; the last song, “Flamenco Sketches,” still breaks your heart. That night, in the car, slowly approaching your destination beneath the pattering roof, you told him the song reminded you of Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks” because it felt endless, somehow, like there was no beginning, middle, or end, just an eternal melody, which is how you still remember him today.
5/6
“Forever my favorite poet,” he stroked your cheek and you leaned into the warmth of his hand as you navigated the sandy path leading to the cottage. “I forgot to ask. Did you ever make it to London?” he asked. You said you hadn’t. “I’m waiting for the right time,” you said. Both of you looked at each other and grinned.
The sound of the car’s weight on wet gravel reminded you of driving home as a kid, when your parents woke you up in the back seat, picked you up gently, and carried you upstairs to bed. When you put the car in park you left the high-beams on and waited, so that the headlights illuminated the whitecaps out at sea. You sat in silence with him and waited for “Flamenco Sketches” to end completely before you went inside, prepared the kindling for the cast-iron fireplace, opened a bottle of Pinot Noir and put on Bill Evans’ Live at the Village Vanguard.
6/6
The rain is still pattering on the roof in this coffee shop in north west London. You feel a little less far from home now—there’s silverware clinking and the place is getting crowded and people are laughing again—and the man with the lisp is deep in conversation with a friend. You watch him because he reminds you of so many things that used to be. He smiles at you when he leaves, and somehow this feels like enough, or maybe everything. You’ll come back tomorrow and order another hot chocolate and think of that spring when you first understood what it meant to feel complete in that small cottage in Maine.
Andre Breton excused a single reason for being absent from a surrealist seance - one was making love, an impulse over which one had no control. Love can turn back time and remake the seasons. It suspends logic, denies reality. So why does it not make us more afraid?
Wasn't is J.M Barrie of PETER PAN fame who wrote that death would also be "an awfully big adventure"?