hey lovely! I saw your pinned post and I'm curious about what you can come up with my url 🥺
“Where’d you come from?” The child asking was small, barely reaching their waist in height. She placed their coffee on the table with all the air of someone who had taken her first steps right in that very cafe and had been there ever since.
“A small town called Jae,” they answered. “Thank you.”
She nodded but didn’t move away, instead climbing onto the seat opposite them. “You don’t look busy,” she stated.
They smiled. “I’m not.”
“Will you tell me a story?”
“Which one?”
“About Jae. About you.”
Jae. A small town was an exaggeration—the name encompassed a street, a store, the motel, and the family that tended to it.
They had grown up in that motel, a place little more than a realized idea of the word ‘temporary.’ It’s walls were ever filled with stories, short and varied and never enough on their own—all their context had been set up in other towns and other times. Passersby appeared for a drink or a bed, dropping coins and clues about themselves, the former in the tip jar, the latter into thin air as they spoke.
The older ones would collect the money, count it out and ration it, but the youngest hung on only to the words the guests would leave behind, the dust their traveled coats swept in. Foriegn soil, sweet whispers of faraway markets, the kiss of autumn leaves caught on another’s sole.
They didn’t have autumn leaves at the Jae Motel. The trees were green and needled, year in, year out.
Every day new faces came, and every day the youngest took out their well worn book to pen the slips of conversations they had heard.
Did the storm catch you?
It moved ahead of us, thank the heavens. Completely flooded blackbird lake.
The bridge still standing?
Swept clean away—we had to go through Derwill.
One day the book would be full.
One day the scraps of stories would add up to a story they could understand.
One day they would step into that story and see it for themselves.
Now, years later, they gazed into the red fireplace, red like autumn, in an unfamiliar town with a child’s eyes upon their weathered face. They had their own story, they understood that now. They’d always had their own story.
“No,” they said softly. “You’ll learn all about Jae one day if you want to. Tomorrow even, if you like.” They set their cup down and turned to meet those bright wide eyes. “Tonight, why don’t you tell me your story?”
