with: Diana @dianacollins
where: Eureka Valley Ice Rink
There were certain moments in his life that Ezra could point to and say, “That started here.” Specific decisions that lead to the sort of life he had been living for the past however many years. Looking back at himself from the outside, he felt pathetic for having allowed invisible forces to weigh him down on him the way they had. There was once strength housed in these bones, he thought to himself, one night. Drunk and dizzy, the alcohol kept spinning him back to thoughts of his high school sweetheart. Diana’s blonde locks shining in a former summer sun and the image of her smiling at him warmed him up. He felt safe and cozy in these past moments until he strayed far enough down them to reach the memory of the couple’s silent breakup.
In fact, he could easily point to the missed flight to Colorado in his sophomore year of college and say, “That’s where it ended.” Ezra was sick of reaching this point, though. He wanted to be able to erase it, rewrite it into something else. Something that didn’t end with so much room for pity and misunderstanding. Something that didn’t feel so blurry and confusing. It was time, his intoxication told him, to fix what he so carelessly broke.
How to do it, though, was a big hurtle. Should he immediately start off with an apology or wait to deliver the first one in person? He could say “We need to talk” but that alluded too heavily to a conversation they never got the chance to have. Fuck, he wasn’t even sure if she had the same number.
Some twenty-something drafts later and Ezra sent the text then passed out for the night. The next morning, he was horrified to find that he had simply let her know it was him, “Ez,” then asked her to chill–to chill?! The whole morning, he grumbled to himself about what an idiot he was. His moaning and groaning only worsened when she eventually responded midday by telling her brother to shut up.
Of course she didn’t believe it was really him. Ezra hadn’t fallen, but jumped off the face of the earth. Now that he had climbed back onto its surface, he was careful to keep to the edge, ready to bounce back off if need be. He was being pushed back in, though. Which didn’t really surprise him as he wondered if physics didn’t have some sort of law of gravity or attraction to metaphorically explain being dragged back to Diana.
Whatever it was, by the end of the afternoon, he was now convinced that since his years of silence had been broken, he could finally face her. Knowing she worked at the ice rink, he walked over to it since the apartment was only a few blocks away. His heart was racing; he normally made a point to avoid this route ever since he’d caught sight of her a couple of months after having moved to downtown.
When he walked in, he spotted her almost immediately with young child. Ezra checked his watch and figured the lesson that was obviously going on would end by the top of the hour so he bought a hot chocolate and waited in the bleachers, sitting at the tip top corner. It didn’t take much for him to not walk out, though he did consider it. It was his neuroses, which were now locked onto the idea of finally apologizing and making amends, that gave him the guts to stand up and walk down the bleacher steps once he saw Diana begin making her way off the ice.
Ezra was so focused on reaching the blonde right as she was stepping out of the rink that he hadn’t noticed some mother’s bag on one of the last steps. His blindness to it caused him to slip on it, then stumble the rest of the way down so that hot chocolate spilled all over himself and anyone else in the splash zone. After standing back up and composing himself some, his eyes flew to where he expected Diana to be. Sure enough, their eyes locked and Ezra’s mind drew a blank. He couldn’t think of anything–nothing! at all--to say so his compulsiveness took control once more and forced out a weak grin and an even weaker, “Weeird running into you like this.”
