Buzzfeed, Boys, Black Magic

he's in love with California and breaking my heart

We left the Wendy's in his car and drove around aimlessly for a while. I don't think he wanted to let me go home. I certainly didn't want him to let me go.

            We didn't say too much on the ride. I think we were both numb.

            We pulled over beside a canola field a few streets down from his childhood home. Something compelled us to climb out of his Civic. The flowers were nearly as tall as I was, and, from where we stood, seemed to roll on forever. It was a stark landscape. Unending gold against a blue sky, which steadily darkened with gathering rainclouds. Rafi took a few pictures of me on his phone, and I shot a selfie of the two of us. He wrapped his arms around my waist and told me to smile. I told him to quit paying attention to me and look at the camera.

            When I looked at the selfie, I noticed that I was stone faced and his gaze rested on a spot at the top of my head. The spot where he would kiss me as soon as the camera flashed.

            It wasn't too long after that it started to pour.

***

            We took shelter at his house. His parents weren't in.

            "At a wine tasting," he said.

            "On a Wednesday?" I asked.

            "College professors," he shrugged.

            We climbed a staircase toward his bedroom, and I tried to ignore the unsettling feeling that this was the first and the last time I entered his family home. I tried to engrave in my memory the photographs that surrounded me. The teenaged Rafi, with the unruly mass of springy yellow curls and the cast on his arm from that eleventh-grade car accident. The father and the mother and the two baby boys. The chubby middle schooler with a gap-toothed smile holding a hesitant gaze at the camera. I wondered, and then hated myself for wondering, if I would ever hear the stories hanging in frames on the walls.

            When we reached his bedroom, and I saw the suitcase and the duffle bag and the brown cardboard boxes stacked by his closet, the numbness I felt that afternoon was swiftly replaced by a searing pain.

            "Ouch," I said.

            Rafi slumped on his unmade bed.

            "Yeah," he eyed his luggage. "I never really unpacked after graduation."

            He lifted his arms and looked long at me, as if commanding me to him. Against what was left of my self-preservation, I crawled into his bed.

***

            "This really sucks," Rafi said against my shoulder. His breath rose goosebumps on my bare skin.

            "It doesn't have to suck," I stared at his suitcase. "You're the one who's ending it."

             "Please don't say that," he said. Something in his voice turned my gaze toward him.

            His eyes were wide open. Wider than I'd ever seen them.

            "I'm not ending it, necessarily," he said.

            "You want to do long distance?"

            "I don't know if that's a good idea," he said.

            "So you're ending it," I said.

            "I'm not ending it." This he said with such conviction, he almost growled.