cigarettes & coffee

“Emily?”

Over 2,470 miles from home and she still couldn’t catch a break.

She’d touched down in Kahului a few days ago, a little unsteady on her feet and worse for wear after chasing a few glasses of champagne with several fingers of scotch. A nervous flyer at the best of times, it’d been a bumpy flight—to say nothing of the turbulence in her personal and professional life.

Jack had left her just after the holidays, though to be fair, she’d largely pushed them to it, having been emotionally unavailable following the death of her grandmother at the height of the pandemic. After a decade or so of declining health at the hands of COPD, the death itself hadn’t come as much of a shock—if anything, the surprise was that she had managed to avoid COVID altogether. It was a broken hip that proved to be the beginning of the end, from a stupid gardening accident of all things. Still, the two had been close, and Emily wasn’t handling it well.

And it’s not that Jack had been unsupportive. They picked up the slack at home and took care of the dog when Emily found herself crashing on her grandmother’s couch between hospital visiting hours for days, sometimes weeks at a time. And for that, she was grateful. Still, she couldn’t help but notice all that support came from afar—they didn’t do well with hospitals. Of course, she never asked for them to go with her, she knew that. But should she have had to? There, she wasn’t quite so sure, and at any rate, the end result was the same: Jack was gone, and she was out on her own.

And for a while, even that was ok. Always a bit of a workaholic, she threw herself into her daily and weekly responsibilities with newfound abandon, picking up projects and pulling all-nighters with the manic energy she hadn’t seen since her unmedicated twenties. And all that work had been paying off—she’d been promoted not long ago and had a clear path to make director in another two years or so if she played her cards right. But this was big tech, and the broader macroeconomic climate had other plans, it seemed.

Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Google—mass layoffs were making the rounds in fairly rapid succession, and her company was no exception. She had gone to bed gainfully employed one night and woken up at 3:00 am to find her internal access slowly crumbling: Workday, Slack, email, each domino falling faster than the last.

But the severance was generous, so she booked a spur-of-the-moment trip, packed her bags, dropped the dog off with her mom, and headed out for warmer shores, content to self-medicate and lose herself in a good book or three while working on an unseasonable tan. The plan was to enjoy some blissful anonymity, but now here in Lahaina of all places, she’d been spotted.

She still hadn’t looked up from her book when the voice cut through the noise again—more insistent than before. A statement now rather than a question.

“Emmy.”

Her stomach dropped to her body’s basement floor. No one called her Emmy anymore, not since she’d left the District behind for a new job and a new life on the West Coast. Emmy was as dead as disco, just the ghost of a 20-something smoking cigarettes outside the 9:30 Club.

And yet, incredibly, here was an as-yet disembodied voice summoning the past back into existence. Emily closed her eyes and inhaled, bracing herself for the confrontation she’d somehow successfully avoided for just shy of two decades. She exhaled, closed her book, and flicked her eyes up to meet the shit-eating grin of her nightmares.

“Hello, Parker. Fancy meeting you here.”

>>>

In happier, easier times, the two had been inseparable. They read the same books, haunted the same dive bars, saved ticket stubs from the same shows. They’d met her freshman year at Georgetown—he was a sophomore, and they bonded over a mutual love of Irvine Welsh who, ironically, wasn’t on the syllabus of the contemporary Scottish lit seminar in which they’d both enrolled. She introduced him to Filth, he gave her a copy of Marabou Stork Nightmares, and the rest, as they say, was history.

<<<

Flash-forward 19 years and history seemed to be repeating, only the setting had changed from urban enclave to tropical island. They bounced from watering hole to hole in the wall, swapping book and album recommendations with only the faintest hint of aging hipster one-upsmanship waiting in the wings. From B-sides to B-movies, it was as if no time had passed. But inevitably the conversation wound its way to the obvious question: What brings you here?

Parker, it seemed, was coming off the latest in a string of nasty break-ups, so he’d decided to escape the mid-Atlantic chill and check out the surf in Maui.

“But you don’t surf,” she said.

“Didn’t surf,” he corrected. “I took it up after you moved out West.”

And suddenly, there it was: the elephant in the room, clear as day despite their burgeoning beer goggles. But she didn’t take the bait.

Yet.

>>>

It would’ve been easier if the attraction had been instantaneous—an electric shock she could’ve written off as puppy love or the result of a hormonal surge. But the truth was, it was a slow burn.

He made her laugh from Day One, and he was clearly attractive, but he just wasn’t quite her type. And she wasn’t his—the endless parade of gorgeous, meticulously put-together, ultra-femme ladies he seemingly always had in tow made that abundantly clear. Though most came and went, like seasonal window dressings.

And then there was Madison.

Unlike the others, Madison wasn’t vapid. She had depth and fire under the surface and she seemed determined to stick around. When he started DJing at a favored local haunt, she got a job as a bartender. When his lease was up for renewal, she’d conveniently lost hers. And the deeper entrenched Madison became in Parker’s life, the less well it sat with Emily.

It’s not that Madison wasn’t funny—she had a great sense of humor, albeit with a bit of a mean streak behind it. But she wasn’t quirky or quietly weird. And she wasn’t as quick on her feet as Parker—more of an appreciative audience than a true sparring partner.

She was also something of a product of her environment: the daughter of fundamentalist born-again Christians who, while kind and loving on the surface, had a nougat-y center tinged with more than a hint of casual racism, homophobia, and misogyny.

Last, but certainly not least, she seemed to lack the critical thinking skills necessary to see through the world’s bullshit, carve out her own niche, or give Parker a run for his money. Not only did she buy into the dogma of a heaven and hell, no questions asked, she also had some very antiquated notions of who would end up where—none of which she’d ever come to question, despite all evidence to the contrary.

For all these reasons and more, Emily could never fully accept her as Parker’s other half. He deserved someone on a similar wavelength, who could broaden rather than constrict his world view, help him question authority, burn the world down, and build something better in its place…

By the time she realized that this mysterious ideal partner was simply herself, it was too late. Parker and Madison had moved in together, and Emily was irrevocably friend-zoned.

So she did what anyone with a bad case of unrequited, seemingly unreciprocated love would do: stuffed it down beneath plenty of well drinks and denial, abandoned her original goal of a double major, kicked her classes into high gear, pulling down 20-plus credits a term, and graduated a year early so she could jump on the job market and get the hell out of dodge.

The day before the big move, Parker, Madison, and their core group of friends came by to help Emily pack up her one-bedroom railroad-style apartment into the U-Haul trailer she’d had hitched to the back of her Honda Civic. They toasted her over PBR and takeout from Thai Tanic, and as folks started heading home, Parker handed her an oversized picture frame housing a collage of photographs from the past three years—a visual history of Emily’s closest friendships.

It was the only going-away present she got.

<<<

“So what’s up with you and Jake?”

“Jack,” she corrected, though she suspected he knew that. She paused to sip her Newcastle as the question hung somewhat awkwardly in the air. Finally, she added: “It’s complicated.”

Whether it was a lie or a half-truth (aren’t most break-ups complicated?), she wasn’t sure. All she knew was that one bar crawl after years of radio silence wasn’t enough to bridge the distance between them. So she’d play things close to the best for now.

But Parker had always been a bit like a dog with a bone, and he didn’t seem willing to leave well enough alone. “Well, you’re here,” he prodded. “And I don’t see them anywhere…”

Pretending to forget Jack’s name had been childish, but at least he hadn’t misgendered them. That would’ve been a bridge too far. “No,” Emily conceded. “They’re not here.”

“Probably for the best,” Parker smiled. “I don’t think they like me very much.”

“What makes you say that?”

Now it was Parker’s turn to try and find an answer at the bottom of his pint. Coming up empty, he shrugged. “It’s complicated?”

Emily smirked and raised her glass. “Touché, salesman.”

>>>

Parker had visited California once in the years since Emily had moved. She was slammed at work and couldn’t make the trip back East for the holidays, so he’d flown out for a surprise Friendsgiving. He’d still been living with Madison at the time, but she’d opted not to make the trip.

The oven in Emily’s apartment was on the fritz, so they went out to eat at a shitty chain restaurant—but the food was warm and the drinks were cold and that was good enough. With some time to kill before a 9:30 pm movie, they wandered the stacks of the local bookstore, checking out staff picks while ambling through fiction, graphic novels, and art books.

Years later, she’d forget the movie they saw that night, and she’d be hard-pressed to name the restaurant chain or what appetizers they’d split, but she’d always remember it as the best non-date she’d ever been on—even if the hair and makeup and outfit had gone unnoticed.

But all good things must come to an end. Friendsgiving weekend came to a close, and Parker flew back home to Madison.

He called when his flight was taxing into Reagan to let Emily know he’d landed safely. And he texted a handful of times after, but they were fewer and farther between until one day, the well dried up completely.

Emily shot him a Trainspotting GIF on his birthday and tried her best not to get her hopes up as the three animated dots indicated Parker was crafting a reply.

But the dots disappeared and no response came. And that was the closest they got to goodbye.

<<<

Closing time was rapidly approaching, and with it, an oh-fuck-it attitude began to descend on Emily. So what if she wasn’t a confrontational person? And so what if conventional wisdom suggested she might be better off letting sleeping dogs lie? After all, what’d she have left to lose?

But before she got a chance to broach the subject, Parker hit her with his own non-sequitur:

“Y’know, it never would’ve worked between you and me.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“Us,” he said, as if the point he was trying to make were clearly self-evident. “We’re too alike. You’re like the female version of me.”

“Thank you?”

“You know what I mean,” he sighed, getting flustered at not being immediately understood. “We’re practically the same person. It would’ve been too boring.”

Emily was dumbstruck and more than a little pissed—in more than one sense of the word—so she leaned into her newfound oh-fuck-it attitude for all she was worth. “Is that why you dropped off the face of the planet? Cos I was too boring for you?!”

She could see the sting in his eyes, as if her words had gut-punched him. She was almost sorry. Almost.

“It wasn’t that, it’s just…”

“Just what?” Her irritation was bubbling its way up to (self)righteous indignation. “We were supposed to be best friends.”

He looked away. “Madison never liked how close we were. And that trip to California, it was the last straw. She gave me an ultimatum: her or you.”

“So you chose her.”

“What else was I supposed to do? She was my girlfriend—”

“Yeah, look how well that turned out for you.”

“Yeah, well you left.”

Now it was Emily’s turn to feel the sting—but it wasn’t enough for her to resist throwing it back. “What reason did I have to stay? I had no job, no love life, I couldn’t just wait around for you forever.”

“Emmy…” She had expected anger or for him to laugh in her face for her trite romanticism—anything but the sadness and genuine affection that shone in his eyes. “I never realized you were waiting.”

>>>

She could’ve stormed out into the night air, and he might’ve followed. She might’ve yelled with such force that she spat in his face. And he’d stop her mouth with a kiss that contained all the passionate force and urgency of 19 years’ worth of what-ifs.

They could’ve fallen into bed as suddenly, unexpectedly, and easily as she’d fallen for him in the first place—a tangle of sheets and limbs and bated breath as layers of clothes were shed along with long-held regrets.

But the truth is rarely so cinematic.

<<<

The truth is that last call came and went, and they shared an Uber to an all-night diner, & as they drove underneath the passing streetlights, she looked down to see her right hand held gently in his left and thought maybe that was enough.

At the diner. they lazily smoked cigarettes over bottomless cups of coffee, and Emily smiled to herself at the Otis Redding-tinged irony even as their conversation continued to race, making up for lost time.

After what seemed like hours, Parker excused himself to use the restroom. Emily pulled out her phone to check her email and saw the caller ID light up: Jack. And she wondered whether she ought to pick up or send the call to voicemail.