She drove through hard rain. She never made it to downtown New Orleans. Instead she bought red and gold beads at a suburban chain store. It was the extent of her remaining energy that day. Mardi Gras downtown would have given her bragging rights.

The rain kept pouring down in sheets. She needed to get to the ocean, for comfort, for a roar of yesterday.

She knew it was the last time she had seen her first love. His gentle wife interpreted his final mumble: See ya, he said. A lift of his hand, fingers splayed.

She remembered their first kiss at seventeen. The ground had shifted. Later, living on a budget, they shared hope, cockroaches, spaghetti, intellectual pursuits, double-feature discount movies, and once, in a small theater in Paris, a play where Camus' Caligula sprayed them with spittle, so close were they to the action on stage.

He was brilliant and athletic, and he wouldn't dance. Still, he was her hero. In time she grew impatient with his inadvertent masculine disdain. She loved, she adored, she shrank, she got confused. One day she left one last, irrevocable time. She wondered how she could have convinced him to see her. One time he had called her exquisite.

At night, approaching Galveston, the rain had almost stopped. Remembering him cling to life made her ache to be a better person. That wish would likely dissolve in future distractions.

She found a parking lot overlooking the sea and folded back her seat. She fell asleep worrying, what if anybody asked her: Why did you ever leave him? How could she possibly explain? It was too dark to see the water, she just knew it was there.

She needn't have worried so much. Nobody ever asked.

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Beate Sigriddaughter, www.sigriddaughter.net, lives in Silver City, New Mexico (Land of Enchantment), where she was poet laureate from 2017 to 2019. Her latest collections are short stories Dona Nobis Pacem (Unsolicited Press, December 2021) and poetry Wild Flowers (FutureCycle Press, February 2022).