In the skies of late October, the lengthening of the night and the shortening of the day compete to capture the city's hearts and minds. The outcome of this daybreak tension results in a false dawn where the sun suddenly appears in the sky; without introduction, without foreplay. But even before being ensconced with the light of a new day, Angie was already wide awake in bed.
Resting on her side, the screen of her phone cast a bright blue light that strained her eyes' ability to see anything beyond the darkness of her perimeter. Engaged in the romantic affairs of being in her early twenties, Angie's thumb was growing weary from swiping across the screens of various dating apps; Tinder, Bumble, Hinge. In a proud and indifferent display of women's privilege of being the sexual selectors of the species, she was discarding all of the various eligible men within the city's radius; men who took the time and put in the effort to craft the perfect dating profile. But it wasn't a haphazard swiping session of rejection, there was a purpose to it. There was the intentionality of pursuit in what she was doing. Her searching eyes intensely accentuated her face that wore the hopeful expectation of wide possibilities but narrowed around the distinctiveness of particularity...one possibility in particular; the cute guy whom she saw at the coffee shop every morning.
Of course, throughout the countless mornings, where they encountered each other, she could have initiated a conversation, could have taken the first move in breaking the barrier of strangeness between her and him. But Angie knew that she was more eloquent speaking online than in person...without the stress of eye contact and reality's stage fright. Besides, eagerly speaking first would have her commit to yielding too much power over to him. And being in her early twenties, Angie hadn't even undergone her quarter-life crisis yet. She was too young to go after what she wanted with true courage, without fear of failure or rejection; life hadn't bruised her ego enough for her to learn not to take herself too seriously.
So much so, that she took herself to task whenever she caught herself smiling at her phone. She felt like a simp – like she was loyal to a guy she wasn't even dating. But more than catching deadly flu, she feared catching feelings. And over the three-year romantic encounters at the café with him, she knew she was terminally infected. Strangely she was OK with it. Mostly because if it had to be one guy it might as well be him, besides, it was exhausting texting 10 different guys 'how her day went.'
With yet another morning of exasperating her digital search for the male version of her own Cinderella, Angie resigned herself with a half-sleepy sigh before she got out of bed to commence her preparation for the day.
Coming out of the shower, her flowery coconut soapy fragrance competed in the air with the wafting scents of breakfast food that her mother, Clara, was preparing downstairs; so that the eggs, bacon, pancakes, maple syrup, and coffee all had a coconut after-scent.
Angie stood in front of the mirror almost fully dressed, artistically taking the time to add the details on the painting that was her outfit. Her naturally cascading dark red hair added the threatening charm of malevolence – a mirror reflection of a sinister beauty who was at once intense and tragic. She quickly took a snap of her outfit and sent it to the Snapchat universe; friends, frenemies, stranger followers, and the fake accounts of jealous Exes. She used social media to impress, injure, and influence.
"Angéline! Breakfast!" Madame Desbiens' French-accented words echoed from downstairs to reach her daughter's wincing ears. Angie hated to be called by her full francophone name. The truncation to "Angie" was the result of a conscious act of wanting to fully express how she felt. The problem of not being enough of something – too Anglophonic for her background and too Francophonic for her chosen home. But she couldn't escape all of the stereotypes. True to the notoriety of French-Canadian dapperness and style as an aesthetic ideal, Angie's fashion sense impelled her to reach for a black bowler chaplain hat before she satisfyingly went downstairs. Dressing dapperly was a form of good manners.
Breakfast was to the Desbiens household what the familial evening supper was to other households – a meal used for catching up on the affairs of the day. Clara Desbiens, by virtue of her industry, was a nocturnal mother. And so, what was Angie's 7 am breakfast was really her 9 pm dinner – notwithstanding – Clara's face wore the tired marks of a woman who was one food coma away from an eight-hour good night's rest.
"Mabelle! Good morning," Clara greeted her half-sleepy daughter as she placed the last slice of pancake on the buttery stacked tower that she had lovingly constructed.
"Bonjour, Maman." Angie yawned as she took a seat at the marble kitchen island in the middle of the lavish loft.
"What's your plan for today?"
"Not much...school then work."
Her routine was nothing novel. Angie was a sophomore at the University of Toronto; Canada's top university. However, as if hearing it for the first time, every morning when her mother heard 'school', her face brightened with the pride of a single mother who was successful enough to pay for her daughter's tuition fees and thereby sparing her of any future student debt.
"What time do you work until?"
"Till 2 if I remember the schedule correctly," Angie answered through a mouthful of resplendent breakfast comfort food.
"2 am?!" Clara asked half accusatorily, half broken-heartedly, knowing the answer to the reflexively rhetorical question before she had even hurled it.
Fully aware of her mother's purposeful guilt-inducing line of questioning, Angie replied sassily "AM obviously," before she finished it off with an eye roll.
"Why don't you call in sick to work today and spend the afternoon with me?" Clara asked knowing that with the allowance she gave her daughter, her part-time work was merely an attempt to assuage the 'life handed on a golden platter' shame of girls her age.
But Angie was sharp as a whip; she took after her mother...more than she cared to admit. Sometimes, begrudgingly, she felt like a Russian nesting doll forever encapsulated in the larger image of Clara. So, she understood that the motherly sacrifice that sequestered her life for the payment of a debt that she never asked for in the first place, was a ploy she rejected – rejected diplomatically if not explicitly.
"Well, you know, Mom, you could always hire me at your brothel." She paused. "I'm kidding."
"You're too pretty to be working in that dingy inn!" Clara said. Angie was defenseless in the face of flattery. Partly because the inn where she worked was dingy.
"Love you, Mom!" Angie giggled before quickly gathering her things and, in a jiffy, was out of the door.
The low greyish clouds were chasing each other in the sky at the speed at which the October winds were propelling them. Angie fully draped in her fall weather outfit, looked like a wandering slice of the weather itself. Animated by the optimism of hope she began to walk, heading to the coffee shop; where the price of converting more caffeine into anxiety was worth the prospect of potential love...of not having to worry about lonely and underutilized Saturday nights – nights for whom the youth designated for date-nights and other wonderful shenanigans. The loneliness of not having a date on a Saturday night was compounded by Angie's fear of missing out. With or without her, Toronto was always alive, always had plans; somewhere someone was on a date.
Having bought her medium latte – more so for an alibi to stay than for consumption – Angie unpacked her things on the table that was understood among all the baristas to be hers. She waited. Waited for him with the restlessness of being incomplete.
As if on cue, Elias entered the coffee shop, and the show was underway. It was an act that required delicate balance wherein flirtation was the promise but not the fulfillment of what these two strangers sought; close but no cigars. There was his smile, and then hers. Angie was able to maintain a few seconds of eye contact as an invitation for conversation. But beyond that, it was uncomfortable for her. She felt silly. Escaping the discomfort of the grim sobriety of that moment, she launched into her laptop, pretending to work, sheltering there. And finally, on his way out, there was Elias's smile-nod to which she reciprocated before he disappeared out into the streets and each went back to their lives. Even though Angie and Elias never exchanged phone numbers, snaps, or Instagram account she stuck by her dictum: if he doesn't text first, they're never talking again.
Despite the repetition and almost guaranteed outcome, Angie's disappointment was part of the show. She was living in circles, impelled by the madness of a romance, thinking she will cross a different turn at an all too familiar corner. Bruised by something more than her schoolwork, an infinitely deeper drama that was intense and sweet, Angie put on her reading glasses and began working on her late assignment. Even though it was October, the sluggishness of September's 'back to school' vibe was culpable in her procrastination.
At the shadowless light of noon, Angie's classes picked up momentum – three back-to-back lectures. It was tedious. But in the brief five-minute space of walking from one lecture hall to the next, she found herself escaping in the memory of her morning romance. In that brief respite, the lush green university campus of grass, flowers, and autumn-kissed trees became a midsummer's garden. Not before the brazen October breeze blew coldly and tore the dress off of the flowers. It was a shudder of reality that cast some sadness into Angie's heart; to think that no rose that withers can ever bloom again...and some even wither before they bloom. Her class was beckoning.
By the time her classes were done, the afternoon sun was sinking and shining out against the dying of the day. The clouds, stretched in pink and peach-kissed, looked like poems written against the sky. The songs of sun-thirsty Robins were growing more audible in the air as the rowdiness of the city was placidly sinking into tired evening murmurs. Leaving it all behind, Angie was in her own world, plugged into her headphones, avoiding the sad, tired, and dreary faces of people on the bus.
Where she worked was an inn that was a good one-hour bus ride out of the city. Out there, life was less in clusters and more spread out and scattered; where the trees grew taller by virtue of not having towers undermining their height and the horizon opened wider as the air blew fresher into the pure sweet starry night.
The irony of having a part-time job at an inn did not go over Angie's head – the other end of the spectrum of hospitality that she shared with her mother. But the Inn represented something that she yearned for. It was a place on the borders of the Greater Toronto Area; mostly frequented by travelers and those untethered to the city. She worked there, standing on the edge of the universe, her universe, looking out into the horizon, longing to get out and lose herself somewhere. But guilt held her back. Even though she was willing to abandon the beautiful nest her mother had crafted, she knew that Clara needed her more than she needed her mother. And so, the Inn was as far as she could stretch the umbilical cord without actually severing it.
"Thank you!" Angie genially yelled out to the bus driver as she stepped off to commence her shift, not before despairingly thinking one last time of the elusive romance from earlier that morning.
But a single failure was not a final defeat if she chose it not to be...and tomorrow was a new day.