Page 133 of Smoke and Glitter

Friday arrives with nothing left for me to decide.

My flight leaves that night. My hotel is booked. My bag is packed upstairs with my passport in the front pocket because I checked twice and then stopped myself from checking a third time.

I almost go downstairs before I leave. Habit gets me as far as the apartment door. My hand is on the knob when I picture Bex looking up from whatever she's doing and asking what emergency brought me down there.

I don't have one.

So I take my bag and leave through the private entrance instead. By the time Vibes opens, I'm at O'Hare.

The flight board says London beside my gate, and seeing it there does something different from seeing it on my phone. Until now, London has been an idea attached to Autumn. A time zone. A tour. A place four thousand miles away where she built a life without me because I gave her every reason to.

Now it is Gate M17.

I buy water, something resembling dinner and a notebook from the airport shop. The notebook feels important for approximately twenty minutes. Once we're in the air, I open it to the first page. I write her name. Underneath it, I write:

I love you.

My pen stops.

There are ten other things I could put beneath it without thinking very hard. I could build the whole conversation here. Make sure I apologize in the right place. Make sure I don't accidentally make what happened about Elise. Find a clean way to explain why loving Autumn scared the shit out of me when losing her did exactly what I was trying to prevent.

Give me six hours and a pen and I could probably make it sound good. I close the notebook. That's exactly why I'm not doing it. Words on paper are easy. I can change them until they can't hurt me. Autumn didn't ask for a statement. She asked me to let her know me while she was standing there. The notebook goes into the seat pocket.

I leave I love you on the page.

The rest has to come from me when she can answer.

I land Saturday late enough in the morning that by the time I get through immigration, collect my bag and reach the hotel, most of the day is already underway.

London is gray and cold, the wet air sharp enough to get through my coat before I reach the cab. Red buses appear through the rain on the ride in, and the driver threads through streets that seem too narrow for the speed he's using. I spend ten minutes trying to understand which side of the road anyone intends to use before I stop.

My room is ready.

I drop my bag beside the chair, take a shower and change clothes. After that there is nothing left between me and the reason I came.

I sit on the edge of the bed with my phone in my hand.

Autumn is somewhere in this city. I don't know where she lives, and for once that doesn't feel like information I need to acquire. When I open our thread, the last thing sitting there is the address I sent her for the coffee shop in Pilsen. Now I'm four thousand miles from home, and if she agrees to see me, she gets to decide everything about where that happens.

Me: I'm in London

and stare at it long enough to consider how insane those three words are going to look when they appear on her phone. Then I add the only other thing she actually needs from me.

Me: I'm not going to show up at your work or anywhere else. I fly home Monday. You don't have to see me. If you want to, tell me where and when and I'll be there.

There are at least six more sentences trying to follow it. Why I came. What happened after she left Chicago. What I finally managed to say out loud after months of acting like the words were physically trapped somewhere inside me. I delete all of them before they ever make it onto the screen.

This isn't the conversation.

It's me asking whether I get one.

I send the message and put the phone facedown on the bed.

Waiting turns out to be significantly harder when I'm not allowed to turn it into a project. I unpack even though I'm only here for two nights, hang my jacket in the wardrobe and plug in every electronic thing I brought with me. The room-service menu migrates from the desk to the bed and eventually into my hands when I realize I haven't eaten anything substantial since the airport.

The phone stays dark through all of it.

I order food anyway.