Chapter Text
The alarm clock woke Delphine with a start, and she scrambled across her bed as quickly as she could to stop it. Once it was off, she sat staring out the window, blinking at the gray sky and the blinding morning sun. She looked over at her phone, the date and time flashing at her: Tuesday, February 14, 7:02am, Valentine's Day. Delphine groaned as she got out of bed in a daze and got ready for work.
Delphine made her way to the subway platform, stifling a yawn as she joined the crowd waiting for the train. Her eyes were glazed over, already bored with her predictable life, another Valentine's Day alone save for her mundane job. She watched a train stop on the opposite platform, watched it pull away and leave behind dozens of people moving in the same glazed-over manner, on their way to jobs they probably hated before joining the throngs of unhappy couples off to predictable romantic dinners.
She felt the rumble under her feet as the subway approached, and she let out a sigh as she hitched her bag over her shoulder and moved into the crowd. The doors opened with a ding and everyone stepped aside to let the old crowd out before the new crowd pushed in.
As Delphine was preparing to board, she felt the rush of another train approaching, and turned to see the Coney Island-bound train stop; the train was mostly empty, with few people heading to the beach in the middle of February. The train stood there, doors opening, as if it were beckoning her toward it.
The crowd jostled Delphine as she remained stuck on the platform, something preventing her from boarding her regular train, as if she had just remembered an important appointment all the way in Brooklyn.
She heard the beep signifying the doors closing, and she made a split-second decision, dashing across the platform and jumping in between the closing doors, letting out a sigh of relief as she pulled out of the platform, leaving the train to the office behind. She took her seat, adjusting her hair, knowing that she had made the right choice, even though she wasn't sure exactly what that choice was.
Forty minutes later, the train pulled into its final stop, and Delphine stepped onto the platform, bracing herself against the cold.
She walked, head down into the wind, along the street until she reached the boardwalk. It was deserted, except for the occasional lonely worker inside their stands, looking out wistfully at the ocean. Delphine looked out at the water, too, searching for her reason for coming here, and her eyes landed on a lone figure out at the water's edge. It took her a moment to realize it was a person - a woman - walking along the surf. She had a red coat on, pulled tight across her chest against the chill, but her shoes were off and she was kicking up sand into the waves.
Delphine laughed to herself, finding the whole sight a little absurd. Why was this woman here at the beach, on a Tuesday morning in February, kicking around out in the waves? She lingered for a moment, watching the woman bend down to pick up a shell, examining it before placing it in her pocket, and then she turned and walked down the boardwalk.
She wished she could be like that, out frolicking in the waves in mid-winter, foraging for shells, free of the oppression of mundanity even when she was playing hookey from work. Delphine needed that in her life - the freedom, the joy, the curiosity - but she remained stuck in this rut, the past few years all blended together in haze of boring regularity. She let out a heavy sigh, trying to push the woman from her mind as she continued on her way.
The morning passed in a similar manner, Delphine slowly making her way down the boardwalk, stopping to take in the few sights there were to see, until she glanced down at her watch and noticed it was already after noon. Many of the shops were closed since it was off-season, so Delphine left the boardwalk and walked across the street into a small diner. She took a seat in the back as the tiny Russian lady who appeared to be the owner came over, and ordered a bowl of soup to help get the feeling back in her limbs.
Delphine surveyed the walls of the diner - the pictures of the owners with various celebrities, and team photos of little leaguers – until she heard the clang of the door open and looked up to see the woman from the beach. She crashed into a booth on the opposite wall and immediately started up a conversation with the owner about the cold front coming in from the north and it's affects on the currents.
Delphine was hypnotized by the way the woman's hands seemed to dance around her head of their own accord as she went on and on, the red from her coat reflecting off her glasses and seeming to light up her eyes. She watched as the woman's hair, done up in intricate dreadlocks, flopped around behind her. There was something about her that was so familiar, although Delphine was certain she had never seen her before.
She continued to stare after their conversation ceased and the woman poured an unhealthy amount of sugar into the coffee the owner had brought her. Delphine laughed again to herself – she couldn't remember laughing for days (or was it months), and yet here this woman had succeeded twice already today. It felt like a breath of fresh air.
The owner arrived with her soup, and Delphine went to work on attempting to eat it, her mind threatening to wonder off back to the office, but she refused to give in; she had made it this far, there was no point in ruining her day off just yet. As the soup cooled, Delphine looked back over to the woman, who was busying herself with piling a mountain of ketchup onto her french fries. Delphine couldn't help but notice the way that her brow furrowed as she attempted to squeeze out the last remnants from the bottle, and the way her many bracelets jangled as she worked.
Suddenly the woman looked over, her eyes locking dead with Delphine's, and she felt the heat rise in her cheeks. She panicked for a moment, not knowing how she should play this off, but the woman simply smiled – a full, toothy smile, her tongue poking out ever so slightly – and Delphine lost feeling in every cell of her body.
After a second that felt like a year, Delphine returned the smile with a sheepish grin, and turned to her bag in an attempt to act natural. She pulled out her notebook, which she always carried with her to pass the time with writings or observations or doodles, and she turned to a blank page. Her fingers brushed over the center of the notebook – the remainder of pages torn from the book, yet she had no memory of ever doing so. In fact, she made it a point to never get rid of anything in her notebooks, no matter how bad the writing or embarrassing the drawings; they were personal, and if she couldn't be honest with herself, how could she be open with anyone else.
She decided to ignore the torn pages with a shrug, and took out a pen from her bag and wrote out the words: moonlight, starlight, dancing through the currents of my heart. Once again Delphine was hit by the feeling of déjà vu, almost as if she had written these words before, but she flipped through the notebook and could find no trace of them.
Delphine remained in the diner well after her soup was gone, well after the woman had left (but not before she flashed another one of her charming smiles), pages of her notebook now filled with the woman's hands, and her hair, and her eyes.
At long last, Delphine pulled out a twenty from her pocket, leaving it on the table and hoping the extra would make up for the hours she had sat there with nothing except her soup. She made her way slowly back to the subway station, figuring she might as well get home early, attempt to make up for some of the work she had skipped that day.
She swiped her Metrocard at the turnstile and stepped onto the platform, her eyes once again falling onto the woman in the red coat. She was seated on a bench, her legs tucked up underneath her, her nose buried in a book, seemingly unaware that she was no longer alone. Delphine kept her distance, glancing over every now and then to take in the wing of her eyeliner, or the glint of the sun off her nose ring, or the cute little way she scratched her head as she read. The woman remained like that, buried in her book, until the train screeched to a halt at the station.
Delphine quickly boarded and took a seat, hoping the woman wouldn't notice her, yet also hoping that she would. She kept her eyes out the window, taking in the distant waves along the shore and the ghostly boardwalk below them. The doors dinged closed again, and Delphine wasn't even sure if the woman had gotten up from the bench, but she didn't dare look. She took her notebook out of her bag again and flipped to an empty page, determined to use the ride home to make a to-do list for work, but she just stared at the blankness, her mind swirling with the red of her coat and the brown of her eyes. She didn't even notice she was being watched until she looked up and found herself face to face with the woman.
“Hey,” she said, her eyes full of warmth and intrigue, her smile stretching across her whole face. “I'm Cosima.”