You orbit someone for years. Same rooms, same scenes, same tired circles. You see each other. You nod. You’re both exhausted by the sameness of it all, the mediocrity, but you don’t say it out loud. Not yet.
Then one night, Big Sur. A campfire. Michael and Ciara are there too, but honestly, they might as well be on another planet. Because something shifts between Niki and me. Maybe it’s the firelight. Maybe it’s that we’re both finally sick enough of the bullshit to stop pretending. Whatever it is: bang. We actually see each other.
And we talk. Art and life and love, the whole beautiful disaster of trying to make something real. Hours of it. The kind of conversation where you forget there are other people around. Michael and Ciara notice. You can feel their annoyance radiating across the fire, that specific irritation of being the third and fourth wheel to something you weren’t invited into. I probably should have cared. I didn’t.
It threw me. Rattled something loose. By the time we got to Nepenthe the next day, I was so deep in my own head I locked my keys in the car. Had to smash one of the back windows to get back in.
Our conversation continued on the drive back to the Bay Area, wind howling through the broken window, glass still scattered on the back seat. Hours more of it. The kind of talk that makes you forget you’re cold, forget you’re uncomfortable, forget everything except what’s being said.
It started something. Not just that night. Months, actually. Something that felt different.
But darkness is patient. It waits. It knows you better than you know yourself. Eventually, hers and mine, those old, familiar shadows, they came back. They always do. And when darkness calls, you answer.
So with the recognition that you can’t outrun what you are… We went back to our orbits.
But for those few months, it was something. Real and raw and honest. Worth a broken window and then some.