Page 42 of All That We Never Were

He seemed surprised to hear her joking. A tense moment passed, and he served her a slice of cheesecake.

“To keep you strong,” he said, amused.

“I already made lunch,” I complained. “Anyway, what about me?”

Satisfaction gleamed in Justin’s eyes. He leaned an elbow on the bar. “Order one from me, please. And be nice.”

“Eat shit.” I sat down on a stool and took Leah’s fork, stabbed a piece of cheesecake, and brought it to my lips.

She was indignant, but then she laughed. My brother watched us with curiosity.

I went into the kitchen to say hello to my parents, then we left. The streets of Byron Bay, with their low brick and wood buildings, were full of kids skating and people coming back from the beach with their boards under their arms after surfing through the early morning at Fisherman’s Lookout. We passed in front of an aromatherapy shop and a hippie truck painted in all colors with a phrase from John Lennon: “Everything is clearer when you’re in love.” And we took the trail to Cape Byron, the easternmost point of Australia.

“Don’t go so fast,” I told her.

Leah stayed by my side while we climbed the trail with its alternating stairs and dirt. The edge of the cape was covered with a blanket of green grass that contrasted with the blue of the sea. We walked around the cliff in silence. The air was tranquil.

“Are you here?” I asked her.

“Here?”

“Really here, in this instant. Stop thinking and just enjoy the path, the views, everything around us. You know what happened to me one time in Brisbane? I was an intern at a company twenty minutes from my apartment, and I passed every day down this pedestrian-only street. I don’t know if I was just looking at my own belly button, if getting to work was all that mattered to me, or what the fuck, but I had been taking the same route for two months before I noticed the graffiti on this wall. I had seen it, I’m sure, out of the corner of my eye or something, like one of those things you don’t bother paying attention to. That morning I stopped and contemplated it for no reason in particular. It was a tree with branches stretching out to all sides, and at the tip of each of them was a different object: a heart, a tear, a sphere of light, a feather… I stayed there so long I showed up late to work. Fascinated by an image I hadn’t noticed, even though it had been on that wall for who knows how long, and that made me think how sometimes the problem isn’t in the world around us, it’s in how we see ourselves. Perspective, Leah, I think everything depends on perspective.”

She said nothing, but I could almost hear her thoughts and see her trapping the words and hiding them away.

We kept going up Cape Byron, attentive to every step we took. I had been there many times, walking or watching the sunrise, but every occasion was different. This time because Leah was beside me and had a pensive expression, eyes centered on the waves murmuring to the left.

A half hour later, we reached the lighthouse, which rose more than three hundred feet above sea level. We stayed there awhile looking at the landscape, then decided to take a trail that bordered the bottom of the cliffs. We stopped when we found a herd of wild goats.

“I’m dying of thirst,” she said, sitting down.

“Here. Take a sip.”

I passed her the bottle of water and sat on the ground in front of the sea. When a wave broke against the rocks, the water came in, sliding forward until it almost touched our feet.

“Should we eat here?” she asked.

“Why not?” I took the sandwiches out of my backpack.

“You know? I think you’re right. That sometimes we don’t look at things the right way. I did when I used to paint. It was inevitable that I’d fixate on details, you know, tones, shapes, textures. I liked that. Absorbing it. Interiorizing it.”

I looked at her profile, the slightly oval line of her forehead, her prominent cheeks, the curve of her lips, her button nose, how soft her skin looked beneath the sun, and the golden tone it took on.

“We can’t do it all the time. Just in certain moments,” I said.

“I guess.” She took a bite of her sandwich.

I had finished mine, so I took off my shoes and got comfortable on the rock lying next to her. The sky was clear and a soft breeze was blowing. If this wasn’t happiness, tranquility, life, I didn’t know what could be. I closed my eyes and felt Leah moving, lying down too. I don’t know how long we were there like that, if it was ten minutes or an hour, but it was perfect, and all I did was breathe.

“Axel, thank you for this. Thank you for everything.”

I opened my eyes and analyzed her expression. We were close, and only her tousled hair came between us. “Don’t thank me. We’re a team, remember?”

“I thought you said tribe, and you were the chief.”

“True.” I laughed. I raised a hand, serious now, and touched her arm to get her attention. She pulled away brusquely. “Hey––you remember what we talked about at the beginning of the month?”

“Yeah, I remember.”

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