missing you - neil weiner

April 12, 2018 -- Sean’s Journal

At the café, I open my journal and begin writing to you—the one I haven’t met but somehow feel. The first time I sat here, I knew you.

This table is tucked beside the tall front window. The light falls here differently, filtered through the glass in a way that turns everything intimate. I feel your presence beside me, familiar in a way I can’t explain. At twenty-four years old I long for a love I’ve never known. I imagine you as smart, sensitive, grounded in yourself in a way I’m still learning to be. I’ve come to this same café, this same chair, for a month now, drawn by someone  I can’t name. 

My parents used to say I was a highly sensitive child, though I never understood what that meant. At night, my brother’s hurt or my sister’s sadness moved into me as if it were my own. I would lie awake in the dark, heart pounding, burdened by pains that were not mine. Later, in school, I was unable to participate in team sports, bombarded by the anxieties and despair of the students left unchosen.

***

June 2018 -- Camila

I drift through the shelves of my favorite bookstore the way some people enter a chapel: with reverence. Books have always spoken to me before I touch them, a pulse in my fingertips, with certain passages carrying feelings meant for the right stranger. Halfway down the poetry aisle, one worn volume stops me. I pull out a used copy of Poems by John Keats as if it has chosen my hand.

It falls open to a dog-eared page. 

“I almost wish we were butterflies and liv’d but three summer days—three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.”

  Tear stains have blurred the ink, and the sorrow in them strikes me so deeply that my head sways. Whoever read these words loved with a depth that lived in these pages. My chest tightens, then opens. I turn to the front and see the name Sean written in small letters at the top of the title page. Something inside me surges.

With unsteady steps, I approach the register, holding the book against my chest as if it has become a second heartbeat.

The clerk says, “Keats had the same effect on a guy who was in here a few months ago. He used to stand in the poetry section reading for hours. He’d buy one, then return it two months later to help pay for the next one.”

“Do you know how to reach him?” 

“No. We don’t keep that information. Last time he was in, he said he’d moved. Leave your name and email address. If I see him again, I’ll pass it along.”

I print my name, Camila, and email. 

When I step outside, I’m greeted by a bright blue spring afternoon. The street is canopied by magnificent oaks, their new leaves shimmering. Flowerpots line porches, tulips and geraniums spilling color down stoops and steps. Everything is arranged as if in celebration. For the first time in my twenty-five years, I feel the joy of a kindred soul somewhere in the world. 

I stop at my favorite neighborhood bar, Atlantis: The Lost Bar, for a glass of wine. I walk the two blocks to my apartment with the Keats book tucked under my arm.

Before I can sink into my favorite reading chair, my hand rises automatically to my throat and finds only skin. 

My grandmother’s necklace is gone. 

The small gold half-heart engraved with my name on the back has vanished. 

Panicky, I race back to the street, retracing every step: the bookstore aisles, the sidewalk cracks, the dim floor of Atlantis, the bathroom sink, beneath tables. 

Nothing. 

As I return home empty-handed, grief hardens into certainty. The universe allowed me one glimpse of a matching heart only to snatch it away. 

I haven’t been starving for love in the ordinary sense. For three years I’ve lived with Daniel, a loyal man who warms my side of the bed and speaks of marriage with calm certainty. We’ve built the sort of life people admire. I care for him deeply. He doesn’t know that a hidden chamber in my heart has remained locked, as if it signed one contract while preserving another unwritten vow.

Since childhood, I’ve carried an impossible longing for someone I could never name. At odd moments, in cafés, on trains, or waking from dreams, I would feel the nearness of a stranger who understood me completely. I never told Daniel. How do you confess faithlessness about a ghost? I listened for footsteps that never came, until the day I opened the Keats book and saw Sean’s name.

***

October 15^th, 2022 -- Sean

Four years later I visit my friend Eric in my old neighborhood. I bring along some old clothes to donate to the Goodwill around the block from where I used to live. 

We meet first at Atlantis: The Lost Bar, trading stories in the same dim amber light where I once spent long afternoons. In the middle of his sentence, a strange impulse overtakes me. Without thinking, I slide my hand beneath the booth cushion. 

My fingers close around something metallic. I pull out a gold chain. A half-heart locket swings from it.

I laugh. “I’ve found treasure under the cushion in a booth?”

“Turn it over, bro.”

I flip it in my palm. The engraved name catches the light.

  Camila.

“It must have—” 

I stop. The room tilts. 

A shock of recognition passes through me, irrational and immediate. My chest expands with a fierce attraction to someone whose name feels strangely intimate in my mouth. For a moment, I can only stare at the gold half-heart, stunned by the certainty that I must find the woman who dropped it.

I hadn’t always lived alone inside a fantasy. In my twenties, I tried love the ordinary way. I dated kind women, bright women who discussed  futures across candlelit tables. But whenever things became serious, a restlessness rose in me, as if I were betraying someone I hadn’t yet met.

Years earlier, in a crowded café, I’d looked at an empty chair and felt with terrifying certainty that someone belonged there. I never saw her face. I only felt her presence. After that, every relationship was measured against the perfect love waiting for me.

I ended relationships gently; a thread kept pulling me toward the woman I’d never met.

Eric and I leave the bar and head to my car, where the trunk holds a small archive of my former selves. We sort through old clothes that no longer fit: faded jeans, jackets, and my rec league basketball jersey. 

Eric tells me I should rip my name off the front before donating it. 

I run my fingers over the stitched letters.

  I can’t. 

After we drop everything off, Eric points out the old hangouts, corners where we wasted whole summers smoking a joint and plotting who to ask out. I’m only half listening. 

The other half keeps drifting back to the necklace. To the feeling I experienced the moment I touched it. 

Somewhere nearby, perhaps in the same neighborhood, its owner moves through her life unaware that something of hers rests in my pocket. 

I feel tethered to a stranger.

***

October 28^th, 2022 -- Camila

Daniel and I stop at the local Goodwill to hunt for costumes for a Halloween party. He’s going as an AI Chatbot, so he prowls the jacket racks in search of the right blazer while testing robotic phrases into his phone in a flat mechanical voice. 

I choose the old-fashioned route: an athlete with two black eyes and a battered football helmet. 

I thumb through faded jerseys without interest until my hand freezes mid-motion. There, hanging between a Trail Blazers tee and a Little League windbreaker, is a shirt with Sean stitched across the front. 

My pulse jolts so hard I nearly drop it. I pull it from the rack and lift it closer. A faint trace of cologne rises from the fabric. Clean. Sharp. Masculine. 

I close my eyes, searching memory. Dior Sauvage. The same scent that clung to the Keats book. 

Somewhere in this city is a man named Sean, whose heart strains through the dark to reach mine, only to fall inches short.

***

October 30^th, 2022 -- Sean

Eric invites me to a Halloween party at a neighbor’s house, and I decide to bring Amanda, whom I’ve been casually dating for six months. 

         I immediately choose Lord Byron: long coat, waistcoat, cravat, slightly disheveled hair. 

After piecing the costume together from Craigslist finds and Halloween sites, I practice a distant expression, as if I’ve just received devastating news.

Amanda chooses Cleopatra, gold cuffs, white gown, jeweled collar. 

She says it’s because she likes the look, but something about the choice unsettles me. Cleopatra was desired by emperors yet belonged to no man. 

I wonder if that will be my fate as well: to want love deeply and never find what I seek..

I slip the gold half-heart necklace into my pocket.

  I feel the necklace pulsating against my leg. Or imagine I do? 

We find the party in full swing. Eric’s house has been transformed into a cheerful haunted mansion. Orange lights glow along the roofline. Carved jack-o’-lanterns grin from window ledges. Black streamers hang from the ceiling. Fake cobwebs drape the bannisters.

Bowls of candy corn, gummy worms, and chips crowd the counters beside a punch bowl swirling with dry ice.

The living room rocks with laughter. A DJ spins dance remixes of The Monster Mash, Ghostbusters, and themes from The Exorcist. 

I scan the creative costumes: witches balancing cocktails, zombies taking selfies, superheroes arguing over beer, a nun dancing with Dracula. 

Then I see her.

Near the hallway stands a woman in a football helmet, wearing the very shirt I donated. 

For a moment, the party noise disappears and instinct urges me toward her.

I take one step before Amanda catches my arm.

“Come on, you have to meet them.” 

She pulls me toward a smiling couple with drinks in hand. 

I glance back, but the masked woman is hidden in the moving crowd.

  In my pocket, the gold half-heart burns hot against my thigh. I tell myself I have an overactive imagination.

I pull the necklace out to prove it is only metal. It flashes in the party lights.

I’m more than a little drunk. Someone bumps my shoulder from behind. Another guest brushes past. I shove the necklace toward my pocket while steadying my drink with the other hand.

***

October 31^st, 2022 -- Camila

Daniel and I arrive as the party that swells with music and laughter. We settle into chairs in the corner, drinks in hand, content to watch the parade of costumes. 

A couple sweeps past in a sweep of elegance: Lord Byron and Cleopatra.

As they pass, the faint scent of his cologne reaches me. 

Dior Sauvage. 

The effect is instant.

A warm, electric sensation races through me, and I grip the arms of the chair. 

Desire blooms so suddenly it startles me. 

I force a smile and blame it on the wild sex night Daniel promised me.

  My eyes search the crowd for the poet who has already disappeared.

At the witching hour, the party thins, leaving only a few of us to clean. I see something glint in the debris.

I bend down and lift it free. 

My breath stops. 

It’s my lost necklace, the gold half-heart turning cold in my hand.

  How did it get here? 

Who carried it to me?

I show Daniel. He gives a nervous smile. “Spooky night. But that tops it all.”

I close my fingers around the necklace and know with certainty: tonight my missing half had been close enough to touch.

Dr. Neil Weiner has over 40 years’ experience as a clinical psychologist who specializes in trauma recovery and anxiety disorders. He enjoys using stories to help readers harness their resilience to aid them on their healing journey. He has been published in a variety of professional journals and literary fiction in over forty magazines. His psychology books include Shattered Innocence and the Curio Shop. Non-psychology publications are Across the Borderline and The Art of Fine Whining. He has a monthly advice column in a Portland Newspaper, AskDr.Neil. nweiner@usa.net