Morning Sun
a short story
1
Outside the apartment window, beyond a downhill slope of buildings and roads, sat the sea. Evening light brightened the otherwise dark room, sunlight breaking through clouds, the sky still misty from rain. The conditions perfect for a rainbow, I searched the sky for colors. Nothing.
I sat facing the view with my legs out in front of me on the blue couch. There was a wooden dining table with two chairs. The large bed in the room where at night I stayed on the right side, not allowing any part of myself to pass over the middle. But really the view was why I bought this apartment. Why I moved to this city. To start somewhere new, yes, but also to have something to look at.
The view of the sea wasn’t everything I thought it would be. Nothing was what I thought it would be. Ever since he decided not to come.
A week ago, Julian left me here. He had called me just as the movers were bringing in the couch. I answered cheerfully and started talking about the new apartment, how perfect it was.
Julian was quiet. And then he said, “I’m not coming anymore.”
That was it. I asked why. I asked if there was someone else. I asked if I’d done something. He said it wasn’t about me. He said a lot of things that meant nothing. Then he said goodbye. I sat there holding the phone, staring at the dark screen, until the movers came to ask for a tip.
Julian and I had met almost two years before at college. I often saw him around campus. I’d even point him out to my friends. I’d say, if only I had a boyfriend like that. Once, he caught my eyes with his. Instead of looking away, I held his gaze and smiled.
A few days passed and we ended up at the same house party. When I walked in, my friends Emily and Sadie pulled me into the kitchen, poured me a drink, and started telling me the night’s gossip in unison. Emily, facing the door, stopped and said, “look, it’s him.” I turned my head and saw him looking at me, then away, then back.
I felt my face flush. My friends laughed. They urged me to go and introduce myself. And then suddenly Emily whispered, “he’s coming over.” No one moved. And then, “Hey,” he said. “I’m Julian.”
A few days after that we had our first date. In the kitchen of my college apartment, I told him how I used to watch him around campus. He said he’d seen me too, and thought I was beautiful. Then he stepped closer and looked me in the eye. Surprising myself, I reached out and traced the long bridge of his nose. I wanted him to kiss me. I was waiting for it. I looked down for a second and saw that he was rubbing his thumb along the side of his index finger, back and forth, but his eyes never left mine. He was waiting, like he had all the time in the world, and in that moment I felt that I didn’t. So I leaned in first, eyes closed.
I continued to look out at the water from my apartment window, trying to think of something else, my new job, this new city. But in the past days, after Julian told me he wouldn’t be coming, I loved him more than I ever had. I called and texted and sent him emails but received no response. I tried to think about ways to get him to come, to reconsider. He expanded in my mind until I could no longer think of anything else. I was tired, my eyes red and puffy, and finally I decided I’d lie down for a nap.
As I lay in bed, the clouds covered the sky. One pitiful week had passed since Julian’s call. I counted the days. I had missed my period—it was four days late. I held my breath for a moment, then smiled to myself.
When my eyes opened again I felt damp, my mouth dry, on the right side of the bed. I felt the familiar dull ache of pain in my stomach. The sun was setting outside, the sky now clear of all rain clouds. What a fool I had been.
2
My body still cramping, I sat on the blue couch flipping through a novel I’d just unpacked. Some fiction I might have liked, but I found the romance was too painful to read. As I sat I thought I heard a baby crying in the apartment above me. I closed my eyes until a thought crept into my mind, maybe Julian really did leave me for someone else.
Before the phone call, there was a night he didn’t answer his phone. He called back the next day and said he’d fallen asleep. I believed him then, but now I wasn’t so sure.
Five months after we started dating, Julian invited me to visit his family for the first time. I was nervous. It was the 20th birthday for his sister, Sandra, and his family threw a party.
During the party Sandra took my hand and led me to a big couch and sat me down with a few of her friends. She was much more outgoing than her brother, but they shared the same wide smile, the same big laugh, where one throws their head back slightly.
“How beautiful you are, Julian is very lucky,” Sandra said, flashing her bright teeth. “How did Julian find a girl like you?”
I told her I was the lucky one, saying off-handedly how happy I was.
Sandra’s friend leaned over her and asked. “I’m wondering, how did you get him to break up with his long-term girlfriend?”
The girls looked at me. I laughed lightly. “I don’t know, I thought I was the long-term girlfriend.”
Again Sandra threw her head back, laughing.
I looked across the room again for Julian. There he was with an old friend, with a drink in hand. He wasn’t looking my way.
As guests left, I helped his mom clean up the small mess in the kitchen. His mom was easy to talk to, just like Sandra. I excused myself when I heard the bathroom door open down the hallway, Julian was coming out of the shower, clothes on but his dark hair still dripping.
I threw my arms around his neck, laying my chin on his shoulder and feeling my face get damp in the process. “How was it?” he asked. “Did Sandra keep you entertained.”
“It was fine,” I said, feeling his arms tighten around my waist. “Well, Sandra’s friends did bring up some past girlfriend of yours. Why didn’t you ever mention anything? It sounded important.”
“Of course it’s not” he said after a pause, and then turned his head to kiss my forehead.
I had never asked him again. I was still sitting on the couch, novel on my lap. Could there have been someone else? For him to leave me for someone else seemed an action so offensive, a betrayal so great, I couldn’t do anything else for the weight of it. I had done so much for him. I had helped him with his university papers. I had made him a dentist appointment when his tooth was hurting, his hand was constantly up to his jaw. When he was sick, shaking with chills, I had even laid in bed with him, my body warming his until he fell asleep.
One tends to think that these things will all even out. I never expected I would be left with less received than I was given. Not from Julian.
I picked up my phone and searched for Sandra on social media. I scrolled through a few recent photos she had posted, one of her and friends, a selfie, and then I stopped on a photo with Julian in the background. It was blurry but he was talking with a girl with long dark hair, whose back was facing the camera. It had been posted two days ago.
My hand trembled. I set my phone on the couch and pushed the novel away with a hard gesture. If anything had been around I would have picked it up, twisted it in my hand, thrown it, broken it. There was nothing around but a bracelet on my wrist. I stretched it until the elastic snapped, sending small pearl beads scattering across the floor. I listened to the beads rolling in all directions, and when at last the sound stopped I walked across the room and got the broom from the closet. I swept up everything, feeling under the blue couch. I separated beads from dust and put them into a small cup. After that, I felt nearly better.
3
Those days I felt like the girl from the fairy tale, the one who is expected to weave gold from straw by morning. It’s as though all I ever got with Julian were bales of hay, which I worked with diligently. Carefully. But now morning has come and the straw is still straw. Of course it is, I never had any special luck. And he never came by even to check.
I tried to push away memories of Julian, but they kept coming.
I kept thinking about was when Julian was cooking dinner for me in my old college apartment. I stood next to him and he would turn and kiss me in between small tasks. And once, out hiking together, an insect landed on Julian’s arm. He didn’t brush it off or kill it. He blew on it, gently, until it lifted away.
Another memory is when he yelled at me in the car. Accusing me of humiliating him in front of our friends. His tone frightened me, and all I had done was make a joke about the time that I had written one of his essays for him while he was busy with work. But by the time we arrived back to my apartment, we had both apologized. I invited him to come inside.
I remembered the day I showed him my offer letter for my new job here. He whistled, pulled me into a hug, and said into my hair, “my smart girl.” I laughed and talked about the move. “But what am I going to do?” he asked, I said that he’d find something in no time. I remembered how his body stiffened, just for a moment.
Like this, life in my new apartment continued. I sat on my floor unpacking boxes, waiting out the weeks before my new job started. I tried to stay busy, I cleaned a lot, finding more beads on the floor and in the couch cushions. Every time I thought of Julian I tried to put a wall in my head. But after a while my mind was filled with walls.
I was extremely gentle with myself. Slow with my movements. I made my favorite foods. I tried a new recipe, a cake, breaking the egg shells as though it was my own fingers that would crack. I stood motionless in the kitchen in between tasks, thinking about Julian.
A phone call I had with Emily the first day at my new apartment entered my mind. She had never wanted me to move. It was too far away, she said. Even on the phone, standing in my new living room, I could hear her worry. “It’s beautiful here,” I reassured her. “I have a great view.”
“And what is the sea from up there? A bit of color?”
Maybe it was blue out in the distance from way up here, but it was also the sea. Above all a reminder that I was somewhere far away from where I once was. How ironic, that I was escaping from something and at the same time something was escaping from me.
4.
One evening, I saw his name on my vibrating phone. I felt all at once a start of joy, a stab of pain. I felt the veins pulsing beneath my skin. Pushing my hair back behind my ears, I answered.
“Hello,” he said.
“Julian?”
“Yes, uh, I have a few of your things, some notebooks. Should I ship them?”
“I can do without those.”
A short pause. I thought I could hear him breathing. I had a lot of questions, but it didn’t feel right to ask him anything.
“How are you, then?” He asked. “How’s the new apartment?”
I thought about this, “lonely.”
“Ah, surely not.”
“Yes, because you left me here. I’ve tried to call you.”
“I didn’t call you to fight,” he said. After a pause he added, “Look, I know this is for the best.”
“You say that but I still don’t know your reasons. Had you been planning not to come for a while?”
He didn’t answer.
“What’s her name?” I said.
“Whose name?”
“Whoever. I don’t know. The other woman.”
I heard Julian sigh. “I think it’s better if we just both work on moving on from this,” he said, with what seemed like genuine sadness in his voice, which made me soften. “I’m sorry, Ellie. And I hope you can forgive me.”
“Okay,” I said with a forced irony in my voice. “I forgive you.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then he said a too-long goodbye and hung up.
I sat in silence for a long time after the call. Giving my forgiveness so easily when in fact I still have no answers felt like another betrayal, and not from Julian. I continued to do him favors, providing closure he doesn't deserve.
5
One day I awoke to the warm morning sun shining through the window. I sat on my bed and stretched my arms over my head, got ready for the day and started to make breakfast. At one point I realized I hadn’t thought about Julian at all. In that moment I felt certain that I no longer loved him. If he didn’t want me then surely for reverse reasons I shouldn’t want him either.
I checked my mailbox, I had received the notebooks from Julian. The edges crumpled on one side, with one missing. No note inside. I tossed them on the couch and sat down.
Outside the view remained the same. Emily was right, it was just a bit of color from here, a flat, distant thing. I couldn’t smell the salty water. I couldn’t see the waves. I wish I could go to the waves now, swim out and let the waves push me back to shore.
I got up and went to get my bag with my house keys inside. I walked outside, closing the door, gently, as if not to let the window know I left its view. It was cloudy now, the overcast painful on my eyes. As I walked I saw a woman on the other side of the street, she was holding the hand of a toddler. I smiled at her as I passed.
The color of the water was different up close. The sand was blowing all around me. I said his name out loud and couldn’t hear my own voice. I said it again, louder. No answer except for the waves splashing, the wind whistling in my ears.
I took off my shoes and walked to the edge of the water, the waves splashing my legs. The sun was setting by the time I started back up towards my apartment. When I opened my door I saw the curtains blowing with a light breeze, my window still open. I took a step inside when my foot slid slightly, I looked down, another pearl bead. I picked it up and let it shine in my hand, then set it on the windowsill.
Thank you for reading! A special thank you to my editors.
Sincerely, Oatmilk Allison
Love it!!
i was invested in this story!