It’s easy to be adventurous when you try to redefine home.
Is it the brittle mansion in Metropolis? The shoe box apartment in Yonkers? The dorm room in Boston? Or maybe it’s the backseat of a 1998 Toyota Camry in all three of those places? There’s a sense of safety in transition, in being able to pack up without fear of where exactly you’ll end up at the end of the night.
At least that’s what I like to tell myself so that my stomach doesn’t churn every single time.
But this story isn’t about home, not in the sense of four walls and a plot of purchased land. This is about finding that one person you’d chase across the globe with nothing more than a postcard saying they miss you.
Her name is Kara, maybe, because she changes her name with every season—blonde hair that puts piles of polished gold to shame, and blue eyes that bring oceans and tropics to mind. I told her once I would write a sonnet for every shade of blue in her eyes—a million hues, and always one more.
She infiltrated my life like a catchy song—she had a beat that just begged for someone to dance along, to fall into the music and lose themselves. And maybe that was just what I was looking for—someone else’s song to move along to because my own was loud, and sharp, and distorted
“What do you suggest?” Her grin was infectious, making me warmer than any fever. “I’m putting my life in your hands—,” she leaned in to read my nametag, “—Cat.”
“I’d suggest going to a diner that actually cooks its food,” my terse reply only made her laugh—a little too loud, and a little too high-pitched. She splayed hands tipped in chipped maroon nails on the counter, leaning all her weight forward on her elbows.
“Come on,” a smile, like she was sharing one of her secrets with me, “there has to be something here you would suggest.” It was in the dim lights of a diner in outer Boston that I realized she had the most gorgeous eyes I’d ever seen.
“A grilled cheese?” I offer half-heartedly, “You can’t really go wrong with that.”
“You don’t sound too sure of yourself there, Cat,” she clicks her tongue with a smile, “That’s alright. A grilled cheese it is.”
I didn’t really talk to her again that night, except to refill her coffee and bring her the check. Once she’d left, the door banging closed behind her, I had collected the receipt and cash left on the counter. A ridiculous tip, and a note on the back.
‘I’ll try everything on the menu so you’ll have an answer for the next person to ask for a suggestion. Kara.’
People make promises all the time—some they sincerely mean to keep, and simply forget about. Ones that are just spur of the moment placations. My father promised he wasn’t going anywhere—my mother promises that she loves me. I figured this was the latter, so it didn’t even cross my mind that I would see the gorgeous blonde the next night. Swaying in with a scooter helmet and dime-store sunglasses.
“So, Cat,” she trails off, her smile soft enough to think we knew each other more than a few sentences and a note. She’s—soft, and bright, a cheer spilling out from her somehow. “Have a suggestion for me tonight?”
Maybe it was because this was the first promise anyone had ever kept, maybe it was because of the unfathomable familiar slant of her lips or the flecks of joy in her eye.
“Pot roast melt?” Again, I couldn’t stop the questioning tilt at the end; because why here, why me? I understood when I was Catherine Grant, Carter Grant Sr.’s daughter; but here I’m just—I’m just Cat. Whatever that means—whoever that is. “No one’s ever complained.”
“Well, that sounds promising!” Cheer melts into the corners of her too-blue eyes, her lithe frame sliding onto a stool at the counter. “Tell me something, Cat. Are you a native Bostonian?” I realized on this second encounter how often she said my name—like she could wrap her whole being around the sound of my name. No one else I’d ever spoken to said names with such intent—like they were something to be relished.
I’d later realize what a name meant to Kara, it was the identity of a moment, not a lifetime. Some people kept snapshots of their life tucked away in a shoebox under their bed—Kara? Well, she lived those moments as people she would never be again.
“No,” my hands worked at filling a glass. “Metropolis. Moved here for college.”
“Wonderful!” A student of life, she’d call herself when I found her in Spain two years later—secular in a way I could never dream of being, and yet she’d never even graduated high school.
She showed up every night. Fitting into my life in a hole I didn’t even know existed. Someone who listened without demanding answers, someone who talked when I didn’t want to say anything at all. It was so achingly genuine that I knew I had found something special—someone.
I told her about Metropolis, and she told me about the corn fields in Kansas. I told her about my classes, and she told me about Paris in the fall. I told her my secrets, and she kept them safe. If there was ever a person you could know, without any ounce of biographical detail, it was Kara.
She breathed life into stories—because that’s what they were. A little too fantastical, a little too romantic. I couldn’t fathom a life that had such grandeur that it made a side note of skipping across waterfalls and falling in love with the Swiss mountains. It was like reading a novel, and waiting to finish a new chapter every night.
But like every novel, there would be an end. An epilogue that couldn’t be put off forever. And even with a happy ending, there would still be a longing for more.
It was a night in late August that I cursed the limits of our menu. I always thought we had too many choices—a decision I had come to from having to wait for customers to pander through option after option. But when I realized there was nothing left to try but a ridiculously priced two scoop sundae, there was a sinking feeling in my heart I’d never felt before. It wasn’t disappointment, it wasn’t anything I could describe—maybe it was just knowing.
When she didn’t show up I began to worry—had I already offered her a sundae? Was she gone forever and I hadn’t even gotten to say goodbye? I felt like I was losing something that never really belonged to me to begin with. I was merely an hour of her day, maybe two—I didn’t know her. Only the lightness in my chest when she smiled, or the pride in my bones when I made her laugh.
As I was hanging up my apron, my shift over at midnight, not even glancing at the door when it chimed to announce someone’s entrance.
“So, Cat,” a hedging hesitation, the grin obvious in her tone, “I thought you’d perhaps like to share a sundae?”
It felt like someone was giving me the breath of life—pressing down on my heart and forcing air into my lungs. I spun around to meet her glittering eyes and the relief that coursed through me was a sustenance all on its own. She was here. A promise kept to its entirety—something worth more than any currency on the planet.
“Yeah,” I could never really seem cool around her, always a syllable away from stuttering. “Yeah, I’d love to.”
I want to say I remember every moment of that night. What she said, or even what I said—one was probably profound and eloquent, and the other probably bumbling and ridiculous. But I can only remember how she never actually ate the ice cream, it sat between us and melted into a white and brown mess of a forgotten dessert.
I remember her toes against my ankle—her flip flops kicked off under the table so that she could toy with the bottom hem of my denims.
I remember that she almost frowned when she stood to leave. Jacket slung over one shoulder, eyes looking for something just past my ear. I knew I turned away, so I didn’t have to watch her walk away—knowing I would probably never see her again. But hope is a ridiculous thing—you have the most, when you should probably have the least.
“I pick this.” She says suddenly from the door—thunder shattering the silence between us. I turn sharply on my heel to watch her, and her smile—the disappointment she almost felt gone like she’d made some kind of decision. “So, Cat. Next time someone asks for a suggestion, tell them to have a sundae.”
And with that, she was gone. A wraith into a thunderstorm, her tan leather jacket lost in the deluges of rain pouring from the sky.
Six weeks. That was all it took to change my life. I didn’t realize it then, or even in weeks that followed—but I wasn’t the same person anymore. I wasn’t Cat Grant from Metropolis, who worked at a hole in the wall diner. No, I was a different person so suddenly it took me a while to catch up. I was Cat from Metropolis, who was waiting for Kara.
It’s hard to measure time in the absence of someone. Because it seems to inhabit every act of the day, stretching on forever—one night, an eternity. Two nights, a punishment. Three nights, a tragedy.
I couldn’t stop the disappointment I felt that first night she didn’t drift through the smudged front doors of the diner. It was like waiting for a train to arrive, even though somehow you knew you’d already missed it. A whistle in the distance, a far off plume of smoke.
I found myself trying to connect with customers. Trying to find the humanity in strangers that I fell into so easily with her. With every clipped answer and narrowed eye I understood that Kara was special. She was a red string, wrapped around my finger when I wasn’t looking, tugging at me every time I turned away.
You don’t realize the lessons someone teaches you until you stop expecting them to appear with cherished words of wisdom. To guide you along the path you’ve somehow managed to pick for yourself with no aid from another soul—it is your road, broken and winding through an untamed bush. You can pretend to know what’s around each bend, if that’ll make you feel better, but you know that the future is an untouched and unknown place.
That autumn was the worst I could remember. Maybe it was the snow storm in October, or maybe the hurricane in November. I tried to pin the explanation down to Mother Nature, or even the kitchen fire that eventually forced the diner to close down.
I sat in self-imposed silence, on the curb of a major roadway and tried to think where I had made a wrong turn. When had I made the decision to fall in love with the idea of a person? No, that was ridiculous. I fell in infatuation. I fell in interest. I fell in longing. There had to be some combination of words that could accurately describe how I felt.
After all, if twenty-six simple letters could explain away every other mystery of the universe, surely there was some combination of vowels and consonants that could puzzle out the feeling rattling around like loose change in my stomach.
I worked through my meager savings in only two months—refusing to ask my mother for more—waiting for the diner to reopen, waiting for some sign that I was fighting the right fight. That everything wasn’t simply collapsing around me just as I had begun to believe I was figuring it out. This thing called life, and what it meant to live it.
When the charred linoleum floors remained untouched well into January, I had to accept that I had to move on. If there was a God, a question I wrangled with too often, the message had become abundantly clear—I didn’t belong there anymore. That part of me that wanted the comfort of routine had curled away like singed flower petals, tarnished and irreparable.
It was as if I stood upon the precipice of a great canyon, impossibly wide and sprawled across leagues of barren desert—no life plain to the naked eye. Only baking sun and scorching nothingness. I was gulping in lungs full of heat, screaming into the empty air and waiting for proof of an answer. Was it someone else far off in the distance screaming too? Or merely my own echo bouncing back, cementing me in my solitude.
Time is a ridiculous thing, when you think about it. It is measured in little plastic hands, and slowly increasing numbers. We’ve tried to put an unquestioned answer on something so irritatingly arbitrary that it changes without any reasonable explanation. Time zones and daylight savings; we change the clocks every year and we never ask ourselves what gives us the right.
I found it easier to measure time in practical things. In papers written and applications denied. In hangovers and afternoon pancakes. It was so easy to pretend to move on—like I was in a play, and the part that I was playing had so many things to do. Events that would alter life and change it for the better—or worse.
I found myself in the charred husk of the diner only two weeks before graduation. It hadn’t occurred to me that I had put it down as my address until it was nearly too late. My graduation gown and cap was nestled in the bin below the slot. Scattered with nondescript envelopes and advertisements.
That was what we would all be one day. A stack of letters that we would never be able to read because we were gone. Dead, or simply lost to the insanity of the world. Our imprint nothing more than wasted paper and ink and some impersonal plea for esoteric attention.
I liked to think that I felt something otherworldly that made me look twice, once I had already procured my package. But that would be a self-fulfilling lie. It was the splash of color that caught my eye and made me bend down to gather the ridiculous collection of post cards.
Hello from South Dakota!
Greeting from the Sunshine State!
Konnichiwa from Japan!
Other than the impersonal colored photos proclaiming common greetings from various locations, and the scrawled address of the diner on the back—there was nothing to depict who they were from or who they were to. Glossy photos of the golden San Francisco, the bustling metropolis of Tokyo and the dignified silhouette of Mount Rushmore. They were all dated; the earliest arrived in December.
I don’t know why I chose to hunker down into the dark skeleton of a forgotten kitchen, I don’t know what deity spoke to me and told me this would be a moment I would always remember. A half dozen places around the world from Mexico to Japan; each one a simple portrait of the destination and the messy address of the diner.
The most recent wasn’t from France or Italy, it wasn’t anything glamorous or monumental. It was from Rhode Island. A simple pastel blue postcard with the state capital depicted in grand letters filled with snap shots of their city.
Greetings from Providence, Rhode Island!
What cheer, Netop!
The back had the expected destination of the diner on the bottom right corner, and the post mark was only a week prior. However there was a message in the space that was usually left blank. Four simple words etched in black ink over a hastily scrawled address that meant absolutely nothing.
I’ll think back on how four words would shape a life I hadn’t even begun to think of as my own.
Fancy a sundae, Cat?
I try to remember if I even hesitated—I like to think I valued what I had created on my own enough to mourn losing it. But I think I would’ve been lying. Logan airport was a thirty-two dollar cab ride across the city, and the plane ticket was expensive enough that I used my credit card.
After three hours, and a layover in Washington D.C., I stood in Providence, Rhode Island. A state, and city, that had never crossed my mind in any fashion other than Revolutionary War facts and a general knowledge of where it was in the country. North-East, neighbor to Connecticut and maybe New York.
But now it was my Mecca. It was the destination of my self-proclaimed pilgrimage, it was the edict of my new acknowledgement of self. This person I always knew I could be, but doubted with every hollow paycheck and practical examination measuring my mind and weighing my soul.
I would be anointed in vanilla ice cream and knowing smiles.
It seemed fitting that it would rain. The sky had simply opened up somewhere between the country’s capital and the densely packed epicenter of Providence. Roiling clouds swallowing the sky and drowning aspirations with curtains of ozone flavored tears.
The diner that the cab dropped me off in front of was run down, the windows fogged with wear and the door missing a single pane of glass that was covered with cardboard from a toaster oven box. Dale’s Corner Diner, was proclaimed in neon lights that winked like a beacon on the forgotten street in downtown Providence.
I don’t even remember entering the door, I don’t remember the clatter of a rusty bell above my head, only the back of her golden head. The flickering florescent lights gave her a burnished halo, her rounded shoulder thrown back as she reached for the spare sugar container on the highest of the shelves above the order window.
Maybe she felt the same tingle down her spine that I did, maybe she had the same difficulty breathing that plagued me so suddenly, or maybe she simply heard the bell announcing my presence. I don’t think it mattered, because the moment her blue eyes found me, I was drowning—gasping for breath in a world that suddenly lacked the very air that was required for life.
“What do you suggest?” I ask, breathlessly, standing in a puddle that was growing with every moment of silence between us. “I’m putting my life in your hands—,” now I was smiling, wide and uninhibited, as I didn’t even look for her nametag, “Kara.”
“A sundae,” She offers with bright eyes and that stretching grin.