The Roaring Twenties

Adrift in the City of Angels

I think I'm lost.
Between the palm trees and the mansions of South Beverwil Drive. I sit by the infinity pool in January and turn my nose up at the tourists who mispronounce Rodeo and Wilshire and hate myself for it.
My mother tells me I've changed. I admit that I don't know who I am anymore. "You used to be this happy little girl who did art and read large boring books. Now you go out and come home crying."
"I'm just tired."
So, so, so tired.
Of the type of guys who will never love me. The ones who do. The ones who try and fail miserably. The writers and the philosophers. The polo shirts and the cocaine. The shopping sprees and useless vanity. The self sacrifice and my own insatiable nature which will never be satisfied; It is the part of myself that I have accepted with a bit of regret and love, of which will never cease to exist. The friends who take and take and take and never give. The drinking at dusk and daybreak. My best friend and the wall I have built between us. If she knew the things I've done. November, December, January- why she'd look at me with new eyes and I can't risk the abandonment of brown eyes who have loved me for nine years and more.
I go to the beach in Venice and see the sky bleed pink and gold. The sun kisses the waves and then disappears beneath the sea. I think of summer in Dubrovnik. I was staying in a small white room on the cove. The woman who owned the room was tall, beautiful and stern. She greeted me with Guava and told me they were the fruit of Queens. It's what Cleopatra ate to stay young and beautiful until the poison killed her. I noted the woman's porcelain skin and took a bite. The juice ran down my chin and she smiled. She called me Avery. I didn't know why but I never corrected her. And for the rest of my stay there- to everyone that asked- I was Avery.
My last night in Dubrovnik the woman and I ate Guava fruit at dusk and watched the sun kiss the waves and then disappear. It was quiet and the children were running up and down the dunes and the old sea men were smoking their pipes and reminiscing in Bosnian about all the woman they fucked and the journeys they had at sea.
"I wish you good fortune in the future Avery," she told me. I said thank you. I was going to London for a few days to look at art and be introspective. It would be my third time in London in three years. Unbeknownst to me I would meet the Pilots- my pilots- and torture myself with memories of the Big Ex and unrequited love. In other words, I would go forward and backwards all at once.
I looked out at paradise one last time and tried, although I knew it was a futile act, to remember that the world was large and beautiful. That maybe if everything in the past- all my follies and revelations- had led me to this moment, then perhaps the confusion had all been for something- if not magical, but simple and true; To sit here and eat Guava plants as a girl named Avery with this beautiful and cold woman. To realize that life begins again when the sun goes down and kisses the waves.
The woman rose from her chair and bid me goodbye. Her silvery hair blowing with the last breaths of wind and her blue eyes piercing through the evening heat, she told me; "Excuse me while I slowly enter the sea."
What an odd thing to say, I thought. A simple phrase but months and months have passed and her voice still echoes clearly in my mind.
I watched her walk the marble path, across the dirt road, to where the pebbles turn to sand. With a flick of her wrist her shimmery sash fluttered to the ground and with true grace and purpose she slowly walked through the waves until the water reached her breasts. Then a pause as she turned back to me, waved goodbye, and disappeared into the sea.