The Orange Hour

The last time I saw him, we were running through the rain toward a diner that had closed two years prior. That's the thing about grief—it makes you chase things that no longer exist.

"Your hat," David had laughed, reaching to adjust the fedora I'd bought on a whim, trying to become someone who wore hats. "You're going to lose it."

I didn't lose the hat. I lost him instead.

Three years later, I'm sitting on a barstool in an establishment that bills itself as a gastropub but is really just sadness with better lighting. The sunset outside is that particular shade of orange that makes everything look like a photograph from the 1970s, all warm tones and false nostalgia. I'm bearing up better than expected, or so I tell myself. The weight of it has settled into my bones like arthritis—chronic, manageable, always there when the weather changes.

"You're going to have to stop running eventually," my sister had told me over Thanksgiving, watching me pack for yet another city, another job that would feel like armor for six months before it started chafing. "David's not coming back, Elena."

She meant well. She meant that the running—the literal running through airports at dawn, the figurative running from memories that surfaced like gas bubbles in a swamp—wasn't working. But she didn't understand that some people don't get to stop. Some people are born

with feet that never quite flatten against the ground.

The man beside me orders an old fashioned. He's wearing an orange tie, and I think about how David once said orange was the color of genuine happiness, not the performative kind, but the messy, honest variety that arrives when you've given up on trying to be someone else.

"I'm sorry," the man says, mistaking my staring for interest. "Did you say something?"

"No," I tell him. "I was just remembering a conversation about bears."

He looks confused, and I don't blame him. What I don't say is this: David and I saw one once, in the Great Smoky Mountains, standing in a stream while we held our breath from our rental car. The bear looked at us with complete indifference, and David said, "That's what I want. To be that unbothered by the fact that I'm being watched."

I finish my drink. I check my phone—3:14 AM in London, where the man I'm maybe sort of seeing is probably asleep. I'm not running anymore, not really. I'm just

existing in the space between moving forward and looking back, learning to bear the weight of a life that kept going when I thought it might shatter.

Outside, the orange light fades to purple, then black. I leave a generous tip. I don't lose my hat on the way out. Some small victories, I suppose.