Surfing

She makes him grin. He makes her smile, then a sad ache reverberates from her heart and travels out the ends of her fingertips, shooting invisible tendrils of longing across the continent reaching out to reattach themselves to the core of his being, his soul, his desire for her, as if they had never been pulled apart. Loss is a funny thing. She surfs waves of emotion trying to catch the top of the curl with precision timing so she can ride the wave in for hours, revel in what seems like days, until it dissipates into a foamy brine on the shoreline. On days she can't catch the wave or gets sucked into the undertow and crashes onto the rocks below, tossing and turning in the roiling surf, those days take forever to recover from. He's been gone for months, but never really out of her mind. The wake is half over but she lingers. It's too soon to say goodbye yet way too far past welcome home. She'll pick up a book, put on a record, stroll through the streets of Chinatown and Kensington Market and see him on every corner, walking into every shop, always just steps out of reach, his head turned over his shoulder,  so that she glimpses his face and that grin. That smile. That wide open you've-been-on-my-mind, my-god-I-love-you-woman smile. She runs to catch the door before it closes and struggles to manoeuvre herself into the shop. She realizes they were never here, not together. It was her imagination playing tricks, her heart beating to the sounds of a distant sun, creating surf where there was none, miles away from the sea, stranded alone on the concrete and asphalt, struggling to find that smile, that perfect wave.