Like Bees to Honey | gxg

39. Throw Out Your Plans

Sabina had hoped that this pain in her chest would go away once she got out on the farm working. The farmer's market had been a good experience, and for a while she'd been passionate about ending the family feud, but her real love had always been getting hands-on with the bees and the honey. This was why she had stayed, why she didn't want to go to university, and why she'd said no to Mel even though it broke her heart. So surely, getting back to her job would make her feel better.

Her parents were in the process of harvesting a bunch of honey, so Sabina put on her light work pants and joined her mom in the honey shed. She was on jarring duty, which was usually a job she enjoyed. It was soothing to watch the honey ooze from the strainer into each sterile jar, small bubbles trapped in the amber liquid. It was calming, repetitive work to position the label, smooth it out, and write on the date.

It was a slow, still day, and they had the door propped so that the fan thumping away overhead would bring them some cooler air. Out the open door, Sabina could see fluffy white clouds scudding across the sky, and through the window, she could hear the air humming with the sound of bees. The cozy warmth of the honey shed made it one of her favourite places in the world. Familiar. Safe.

Boring, said the small part of herself that had never felt more alive than when she jumped off a cliff naked.

"What do you think, Sabina?"

"Hm?"

She tore her gaze away from the door, realizing she'd been sitting with a label in her hand daydreaming for some length of time that was definitely too long. Mom was looking at her expectantly, waiting for an answer to whatever question she had asked.

Quickly, Sabina slapped the label onto its jar. "Sorry, I didn't hear what you said."

"I asked what you thought about fruit-infused honeys. Your father and I were chatting with Joan about the mead-cider hybrid that you suggested, and we were wondering what other sorts of things we might be able to make together."

"Fruit-infused honey? Sure. That sounds great."

"You're a million miles away today, Bina. I thought you'd be thrilled to hear that your intervention is already working out."

She was a million miles away. Or at least as far away as Mel might be able to get in one day in her van.

"Sorry. I'm just a little distracted, I guess."

Mom sat back in her tall chair and gave Sabina a searching look. "Little bee, is something wrong? You've been so keen all summer to get working, and now you haven't even done half a box of jars."

Sabina looked at her workbench. It was true: less than a dozen jars sat in the box. She was usually much faster at this. "It's not that I'm not glad to be here," she said quickly. "It's just-"

It was just that the weird feeling about staying in High Valley hadn't gone away. It hadn't been that she'd gotten used to the idea of going to university. It hadn't been that she'd been nervous about asking Mel to stay.

She just felt weird about staying in High Valley.

And after Mel had asked her to run away with her, she finally understood why she felt this way.

When she had dreamed about being with Mel, that dreaming had also been about doing new things, seeing new places. She wanted to go on overnight canoe trips just because Mel's mom had loved them and to climb mountain peaks that neither of them had ever seen. She wanted to watch the northern lights from the back of that beautiful van and kayak with the beluga whales in Hudson's Bay and go to their first gay bar together in Montreal. She wanted more of that electricity she'd felt when they'd fallen off the tube and when they'd gone skinny dipping and even when they had worked together to do the intervention.