California Thunderstorm
I opened my eyes. Something had disturbed my restless sleep, but I didn’t know what. Small slivers of orange light filtered in between the blinds and made wavy tiger stripes against the dark walls.
The air felt heavy, and as I rolled onto my back, I heard the thip-thip-thip of raindrops lazily hitting the window above my head. A low rumble followed, and I felt myself smiling. Heavy rain in Southern California, especially this close to the coast, was rare. A thunderstorm, even more so.
As I lay there quietly, I thought about the man lying next to me and all we had been through. I thought about the years that had passed and the fights we continued to have, how everything felt different in this new house with new roommates in a new part of the city.
I didn’t know if I loved him or if I was just too chicken shit to leave. By now, I had learned that the life I had imagined for us would never come to be. He wasn’t capable of loving me, at least not in the ways I wanted him to. It wasn’t his fault; he was soul-broken. Somehow, that made it harder to walk away.
I turned my head to look at him, his face obscured by shadows, and felt my chest tighten. He wasn’t exactly handsome, but he looked beautifully peaceful when he slept, the pain he carried with him at rest — for a while. There had been a lot of nightmares when he first came…
