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On the Coast of Happily Ever After
In That Haze — No6 (Micro)
Maybe we weren’t meant to spend a lifetime together.
Maybe we were just meant to see the end times before one of us perished.
I saw the signs as soon as the tides began to rise on the coast of California. The scientists had predicted this end for decades, but we never thought we would live to see it, did we?
You and I held hands as our dream house dipped under the erosion the contractors hadn’t warned us about — though we might have known better if we had done our research. But we had been so giddy to start our new lives together that we hadn’t thought of the logistics. You were an artist, and I was a freelancer who waited tables at night. People like us were supposed to be living the American dream — but now where were we?
Even if we had paid off our mortgage, we would have owned land that was useless to anyone else now.
“You should have listened to me,” your mother said to me over the phone. “Never buy a house on the ocean! You both knew better. You should have stayed close to home where you belonged.”
But where was adventure among the cornstalks and country roads we had known? The big city had seemed so glamorous, and life had seemed charmed when the gallery in LA had brokered a deal…
