The Bag

She was lost.1

Not in that pretentious, literary way, but actually lost. She cast her eyes about, desperately trying to form some tenuous human connection in the middle of her vast city. She began a purposeful stride toward the nearest street sign, chastising herself the entire way. She’d lived in this city seven years now and she was still getting lost.2

Granted, she’d never been in this part of the city before and granted, she'd been rushed this morning, and granted, she’d been thinking about Josh again.3

Her hand went absently to the coffee stain on her white bag as the memories resurfaced. Her fingers expertly moved to the spot, traced its outline—right past the buckle, below the clasp. Her eyes shifted and she inhaled sharply. She remembered buying the bag the day before college. She was so eager then, overwhelmed by the city’s designer stores as pretentious sales women smirked at her.4

She reached another unfamiliar intersection, stopped in frustration. She went to a bench, sat, reached for her phone inside her pinstripe jacket. She found the number of her prospective employer. Her fingers wanted to dial. But the phone rang, in the almost psychic way that phones do sometimes. She glanced at the caller ID.5

…Josh.6

She briefly debated picking it up. She found that it wasn’t her choice as her hand involuntarily moved, accepted the call.  7

“Hello,” she murmured, hand to her trembling throat, trying not to betray her deep desperation to hear him talk again. To hear him talk to her again.8

“I was thinking about you. I was thinking about last night,” he said. She imagined where he was, what he was wearing, his familiar smell right out of the books lining his walls. In her mind, he swiveled in his desk chair. He was casually watching birds outside his window, but he betrayed himself as he held the phone like a vice. His voice was remarkably the same. She easily predicted the inflections his voice would take as he spoke, though the words drifted over her. “So I guess I’ll see you at eight this evening.”9

Silence.10

“Are you there?”11

“Yes.”12

He sighed. “I'm not sure we should be doing this again.”13

She hung up. 14

Josh hadn’t always been Josh to her. At one faraway point, he was Professor Newman, of Women’s Studies. She’d walked in, nervous, scared, first day of college and collided with him—his coffee spilling, everywhere, onto him, the floor, her bag. Seven years ago. She needed him from the start and she wasted no time in making that transparently clear. She saw him fall for her in that visceral way she’d thought was reserved for the young and precocious.15

She’d never washed the bag, or gotten a new one. She never carried anything in it. Just an empty bag with a coffee stain on it. 16

Why had Josh discarded her, after an illicit four-year relationship, at her college graduation of all places? It could have been anything, really. It could have been the fact that he felt guilty. It could have been her age. It could have been that he needed to move on, or that she wasn’t right for him, or his perfectionism. It could have been that the last night they’d spent together, he’d suggested bitterly that she was just a little girl in way over her head, and she’d waited until he’d gone to bed and then poured detergent into his plants and killed his cat, then sat in a chair until daybreak, where he found her just sitting there, stroking her bag and staring at nothing.17

Well, maybe. It could have been anything, really.18

So when they collided again in that fated bookstore, she was pleasantly surprised to find that three years hadn’t dulled his need for her. He was desperate like a man his age, and she was vindicated like a women hers. And if she’d had any friends, they would have protested her being with him again, but she didn’t and so they didn’t. And here he was and here she was, and it looked like they were both falling down that trap again. Three years and she’d counted every single day apart.19

Her hand put away her phone and returned decisively to the stain. She traced it.20

And suddenly she knew exactly where she was. She’d been stupid not to have figured it out earlier.21

She rose and melted away, a determined figure in a large urban crowd, an impeccably dressed woman with a stained bag.22