Sweet Distraction ✔︎

[7] 𝑵𝒐𝒕 𝒂𝒏 𝒐𝒖𝒕𝒓𝒊𝒈𝒉𝒕 𝒓𝒆𝒋𝒆𝒄𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏

Isabelle fastened a lid to her take-out coffee and pushed through the glass door of the diner. A taqueria, a Chinese restaurant, the Cozy Coffee Café, an insurance agency, a bank, and several stores bordered the main street of downtown Rainsville. Residential neighborhoods, strip malls, and agriculture fields—lettuce, strawberries, broccoli—radiated outward from downtown.

As far as she could tell, nothing had changed here in the past decade. Not that she’d expected it to. Rainsville was like a dry, overbaked cake stuck in the pan.

Even the seasons failed to change—the temperature dipped in fall and winter, but the leaves remained mostly green and there was little actual rain in Rainsville. Blocked by mountains, the ocean breezes and fog didn’t reach the town either, as if the wealthy residents of Indigo Bay were hoarding the coastal beauty for themselves.

Hardly a wonder that she’d been desperate to leave, even before Andrew had died. As a teenager, she’d found an escape in Indigo Bay half an hour west with its stone cottages, hidden courtyards, and the stretches of beach that hugged the rocky shoreline. She’d gone there to run on the beach. To smell the salt air, stare at the ocean, and imagine what was on the other side. To window-shop at the boutiques that sold French linens, Italian pottery, Turkish rugs, Scandinavian woolens, Japanese tea services.

Her plans with Andrew, the older boyfriend she hadn’t told anyone about, had been grandiose and thrilling—they’d take off to see the world, carrying nothing but their meager belongings in backpacks. They’d work where they could, save money, meet people, and visit as many places as possible—all together.

Then a surfing accident had taken Andrew away, and the devastation that followed had incited Isabelle's urge to flee. When she’d turned eighteen and graduated from high school, it had been so easy to leave. An au pair job, a cheap ticket to Rome, no other plan except to earn enough money to go to as many different places as she could.

A decade later, that plan hadn’t changed.

She walked east to Rainsville Park, the only public place in town kept green by careful rationing of water. The Shingle Mill creek, a narrow intermittent stream of water, ran through the town before joining a watershed farther south. A wooden bridge spanned the creek, leading to a playground and splash pad on the other side of the park.

Isabelle sat on a shaded bench and pulled her laptop out of her bag, opening the browser to her blog. In the past three months she’d only managed two measly posts about the Rainbow Palace.

No wonder. There was nothing to write about around here. The bachelor auction was her only useful content to date, but she had no other ideas.

She needed to come up with something soon, though, or she’d start to lose both advertising revenue and readers—both of which she’d need once she was back to her real life. She could stick out her time in Rainsville, but Lock Heart would never survive six months of slow, tepid content.

She scrolled through her blog. During her trips back to Rainsville, especially when her mother was sick, she’d written posts on Indigo Bay, several local restaurants, a trip to San Francisco. What was left? A review of the Cozy Coffee Café? A description of broccoli-growing season?

She couldn’t write when she was standing still. Being on the move always generated ideas, the physicality of traveling causing her blood to rush faster in her veins, firing her brain synapses to create.

As she navigated the crowded bustle of a market in Hong Kong, climbed to a mountainside tea garden in China, ate curry from a roadside stand in Bombay, she subconsciously wrote the narrative in her mind while taking photographs that captured both unexpected moments and her own carefully constructed compositions.