loving someone

She first saw him on a Tuesday that smelled of rain and old library books. Elena Morales was twenty four and had lived her entire life in the small coastal town of Maris, where everyone knew everyone and love stories were supposed to be simple. You grew up, you married the boy from the next street, you had children, you grew old watching the same sea. But Elena had never wanted a simple love story. She wanted a love that felt like getting lost. He was not from Maris. That was the first thing she noticed. He sat in the corner of the town library, the one place in Maris where tourists never went, with a notebook open and a cheap pen leaking ink onto his fingers. His hair was dark and badly cut, as if he had done it himself. He wore a sweater too heavy for the season. And he was writing furiously, like the words might escape if he didn't trap them fast enough. Elena was supposed to be shelving returned books. Instead she stood behind the fiction aisle and watched him for seven full minutes. He looked up. Caught her. "You work here?" he asked. "I volunteer here," she said, too quickly. "Do you know if they have anything by Pablo Neruda in the original Spanish?" "We have Veinte poemas de amor. It's always checked out. But I know it by heart." He smiled then, and it changed his whole face. "Recite it for me." And so, between the shelves of dusty romance novels and encyclopedias no one opened, Elena recited Neruda to a stranger in a too-heavy sweater. When she finished, he closed his notebook and said, "I'm Daniel. I'm lost." "Literally or poetically?" she asked. "Both. I'm looking for the lighthouse keeper's house. My GPS died." There was no lighthouse keeper's house anymore. The lighthouse had been automated ten years ago. The keeper's cottage was abandoned, roof half-collapsed, full of gulls. "I can show you," she said. That was how Elena Morales fell in love. Not slowly. Not carefully. She walked a stranger through the wet sea grass to an abandoned house and listened to him talk about why he had come to Maris. Daniel Reyes was twenty six, a graduate student in architecture, from the city. He was writing his thesis on forgotten coastal structures, buildings that had lost their original purpose. He had a list of twelve lighthouses along the coast. Maris was number seven. "I like things that are still standing after everyone has stopped needing them," he told her as they pushed open the swollen wooden door of the cottage. Inside, it smelled of salt and rot and time. Light came through the broken roof in sharp white columns. "What do you think this place was waiting for?" Elena asked. "Someone to get lost in it," he said, looking at her and not at the walls. They spent the afternoon there. He measured windows with a yellow tape. She told him about growing up in Maris, about her mother who made fish soup every Sunday, about her father who had been a fisherman until his back gave out, about how she had left for university in the city for one semester and come home after three weeks because the city was too loud to hear herself think. "You came back because you were lost there," he said. "I came back because I was found here," she corrected. But she wasn't sure anymore. He left three days later. He had to go to lighthouse number eight. He wrote his number on a library receipt and left it on her kitchen table where her mother would find it. Her mother did find it and said nothing, just placed it carefully next to the sugar bowl. Elena waited two days before calling. When she did, he answered on the first ring. "I was hoping you'd get more lost," he said. "I am. I'm very lost," she said, and they both laughed. For the next four months, their love existed in intervals. He would travel to a town, call her from a bus station. She would take the early bus on Saturdays to meet him wherever he was. They met in places that were themselves lost - an abandoned train station in Liora where wild dogs slept on the tracks, a shuttered cannery in Portos that still smelled faintly of sardines, a chapel on a hill that had lost its cross in a storm in 1989 and never got a new one. In each place, he would sketch and she would read. They made love for the first time in the chapel, on his coat spread over cold stone, while rain hammered the missing roof. It was awkward and tender and perfect because neither of them pretended to know what they were doing. "I think I'm falling in love with you in places that don't exist anymore," he whispered into her hair afterward. "I think I'm falling in love with you because you make me feel like I don't have to exist in one place either," she whispered back. On a cold night in November, in a town called Aracena, he said, "Come with me to the city. When I finish. Live with me." Elena had never wanted to leave Maris. But now Maris felt too small to hold what she felt. She said yes. She told her parents. Her mother cried. Her father said, "If you get lost, you come home. The sea is always here." She packed one suitcase. She left the Neruda book on her bed. The city was exactly as loud as she remembered. They rented a tiny apartment on the fifth floor of a building that had no elevator. The walls were thin. The radiator hissed all winter. Daniel worked at a firm during the day and wrote his thesis at night. Elena got a job at a bookstore that paid little but let her read all day. At first, love was enough to make the noise bearable. They learned each other's bodies properly in that apartment. They learned that he needed absolute silence to work and she needed to talk when she was anxious. They learned that she hated cilantro and he put it on everything. They learned to fight without threatening to leave. But slowly, without either of them noticing the exact moment it started, Elena began to feel lost in a different way. Not the beautiful, romantic lost of lighthouses. The other kind. The kind where you look in the mirror and you don't recognize the streets outside your window. Daniel was becoming someone. Professors praised his thesis. The firm offered him a full position. He was invited to conferences. He talked about sustainable preservation and adaptive reuse and his eyes lit up. He belonged in the city. His lost buildings had led him to a found career. Elena was shelving other people's stories again. She had applied to three graduate programs and been rejected from two, waiting on one. Her friends were all back in Maris, marrying and having babies and posting photos of fish soup. When she called her mother, her mother said the sea was rougher this year. One evening in March, she came home to find Daniel packing. "They want me in Lisbon for six months," he said, not looking up. "A fellowship. To study the azulejo facades. It's paid. It's huge." Elena felt her stomach drop. "Six months." "It's our chance. You can come. You can write there. Or you can stay here and I will come back every month." "You will not come back every month," she said quietly. She knew plane tickets. She knew his ambition. He finally looked at her. "Don't make me choose." "I'm not making you choose," she said. "You already chose." He left for Lisbon on a Tuesday that also smelled of rain. He kissed her at the airport and said, "Don't get lost while I'm gone." She tried not to. She tried very hard. She worked at the bookstore. She walked the city. She waited for the third graduate program to answer. It rejected her. She started going to a small park near their apartment because it had one bench that faced away from the buildings, toward a patch of sky. She sat there for hours. It was there, in that park, that she met someone else. His name was Tomas. He was old, maybe seventy, with a dog that was even older. He sat next to her one day and said, "You look like you're waiting for someone who isn't coming." "How do you know?" she asked, annoyed. "Because I waited thirty years for my wife to come back from her sister's house after a fight. She never did. Then I realized I wasn't waiting for her. I was waiting for myself to go get her. But I was too proud." Elena told Tomas about Daniel. About Maris. About lighthouses. Tomas listened and then said, "My wife and I got lost in love. That's the problem with that phrase. People think it means you lose yourself in the other person. But really, it means you both walk into a forest together and forget to leave breadcrumbs. Then when one of you wants to leave, the other doesn't know the way out." She thought about that for weeks. Daniel called less and less. When he did, he talked about tiles and light and how Lisbon was a city built for losing yourself beautifully. He never asked if she was still in their apartment. She was. In May, her father had a small heart attack. Not fatal. But enough. Her mother called crying. Elena took the first bus home to Maris. Maris had not changed. The sea was still there. The library still smelled the same. The lighthouse keeper's cottage was still standing, even more collapsed now. She went there alone. She sat in the column of light from the broken roof and cried for the first time since Daniel left. She cried for the girl who recited Neruda to a stranger. She cried for the city apartment. She cried for Lisbon. Her mother found her there at sunset. She did not say anything. She just sat next to her in the dirt. After three days in Maris, Elena knew she could not go back to the city. Not to that apartment. She called Daniel. "I think we got lost," she said. There was a long pause from Lisbon. She could hear trams in the background. "I think we found different places," he said, his voice thick. "I love you," she said. It was true. "I love you too," he said. It was also true. That was the worst part. Love had not been enough to make them go the same direction. They did not break up on that call. They broke up slowly, over three more calls, over unsent letters, over the slow return of his books that she boxed and left outside the apartment building for the super to give to him when he returned. She stayed in Maris. She took over the volunteer position at the library and made it a real job. She started a program for kids to write about abandoned places in town. She wrote about the lighthouse keeper's cottage. Her essay won a small regional prize. A year after Daniel left for Lisbon, she got a postcard. No return address. On the front, a blue tile facade. On the back, in his messy ink-stained handwriting: "Building number 12 on my list was not a lighthouse. It was a library in Maris. I just didn't know it at the time. I hope you are found. D." Elena placed the postcard inside her copy of Veinte poemas de amor and shelved it where it belonged, in the poetry section, where it was always checked out. She was still lost in love. But now she understood that being lost was not always a bad thing. Sometimes you had to be lost to find out where you actually wanted to be. She had wanted to be lost in someone else. Instead, she had gotten lost and then found herself, here, by the sea that was always there, in a town that knew her name, in a library that smelled of old books and rain. And on Tuesdays, when it rained, she still sometimes went to the lighthouse keeper's cottage and read Neruda out loud to the gulls, who listened politely and then flew away, beautifully, inevitably lost in the vast sky, but always knowing, somehow, the way home.