She sits, the sun beating down on her face from the horizon, clouds breaking against the backdrop of a sea of blue. She lifts her hand in front of her eyes, palm facing out, squinting at the water in front of her and looking for the speck of contrasting colors in the distance. It has been almost four weeks since she has heard from him, an adventure she was supposed to be on but had decided at the last minute she was going to work instead. Something came up. She had to be available for meetings and phone calls. 

So now she stands along the ridge, staring down at the rocky shoreline, her armpits already wet from the hot subtropical air surrounding her in the early rain season of the China Sea. She listens, thinking that perhaps instead of the crashing waves on the rocky beach below she will hear the sound of a motor against the stillness of the sunrise. 

She pulls her salty, heavy curls away from her cheeks and then turns back to the cabana she is renting. The one where they met: him, taking a break from the rat race, and her, finding herself lost among the rain and trees of an island where she didn’t speak the language. 

With a slow inhale, she brings her arms out wide and behind her back, squeezing her shoulder blades together. She feels her collarbones spreading and her skin stretching against her neck. She puts her head back and stares up at the sky, wisps of clouds floating against the blue. 

She does nothing but listens, thinking about what comes next, picturing his face, tanned against the sun. She presses herself into her own skin and then thinks about what she’ll even say when he arrives. What is there left to say after all this time? They had been meeting in small moments across the constellation of the last dozen years of the life they have been leading: her, trying to orbit along the center of the contemporary life she is supposed to have in Europe, and him, falling further and further away from the gravitational pull of the societal middle. 

She is ready for that. She is ready for something else, something more awake and something more connected to the world she has felt most alive in. Here, skin browning and salt drying along the cracks of her arms and legs, dipping in and out of the ocean as fishing boats break the whispering winds of the dawn. This is the life she has wanted but has been too afraid to fall into, to awaken into. 

She looks again at the horizon and scans the distance. Still. Nothing. She spreads her toes and squeezes the blades of grass between them, breathing in the morning with the singing of the heat, the cicadas warming up to buzz against the jagged mountains rising behind her. 

And in this she thinks that the only thing that matters is the time she has. Even without him here, she knows she will have to be present. She will have to continue without knowing. And in the silence, she thinks about what comes next. Knowing that it will be uncertain. Knowing that it will depend on her.