#also serena is wearing almost the same outfit as alan......... i see u girl

[miswaken]

She’d known Serena Valdivia for years — photographers and filmmakers weren’t far removed professions, after all. Serena was the first person Alice thought to reach out to when the idea of a film started itching at the back of her mind. It was just a personal project, a bid for catharsis once the calendar flipped back to September. A full year. Serena was happy to help, advising over phone calls and emails with Alice’s novice editing attempts attached. She even made the trip up to New York a few times, removing herself from her curatorial work in Arizona to huddle over lengths of film and cups of coffee with Alice, and the apartment felt more alive than it had in so long.

Maybe it should have been awkward, given the circumstances. The film was about Alan, after all. About them. But the work was starting to feel less like reclaiming and more like letting go. One evening, after hours spent tweaking the transition between one scene and the next, they were slumped on the couch together and something unclenched itself in Alice’s chest. The sky outside was streaked sunset purple and Serena’s glasses were pushed up into her forehead after focusing for too long, and that’s when Alice leaned over and kissed her.

When Serena kissed her back, it was like the world started making sense again. It wasn’t really about the kiss — or what came after. It was about feeling seen and heard and held again, and remembering how good it felt to carry love in her heart. Her grief didn’t evaporate, but for the first time in over a year something else was allowed to exist alongside of it.

Alice was happy.

Navigating a long distance relationship was a new challenge, but Alice was willing to make it work. The arrangement wasn’t perfect, but it was enough — she wasn’t ready for deeper commitment yet, anyway. The film was, perhaps, just an excuse to keep seeing each other as much as it was something to spark Alice’s creative mind. But slowly it turned into something she was proud of, something with enough artistic merit that Serena was convincing her to show it at an arts festival she was organizing in Arizona. It took a while for Alice to agree, but eventually she relented. It would give her a deadline to wrap up the project and put it away, at least. And the last time she’d traveled anywhere had been… well…

She flew out a few days in advance of the festival and stayed with Serena. They drove around the desert and shot half a dozen rolls of film, ate takeout over Serena’s busted coffee table, and slept bundled under blankets with the ac blasting away the late summer heat. When they went to give an interview with the local radio station, knees bumping under the too-small table, Alice’s sense of peace was broken by the familiar barrage of questions. Was Eddie Rodman judging her for believing what seemed so obvious — that Alan was well and truly dead? Or was it guilt rearing its ugly head again, a reflection of that buried internal fear that she’d given up on him too soon?

Serena’s words were a firm reassurance as she brought the interview back on track, her voice warm with nothing but support and praise for Alice’s work. Her hand, when it found Alice’s under the table, was a silent lifeline. They didn’t speak about the interview or about Alan when they left the studio. After dinner Serena dropped Alice off and apologized for needing to head back to the drive-in so late, but there were still details to perfect and iron out before the festival started the next day. Alice didn’t think anything of it.

Her dreams that night were strange — but, then, they often were. In them she was walking in the desert and the sun was setting, and a figure she recognized was walking a few feet ahead of her. She kept calling his name but he wouldn’t turn around, only walking faster and faster until he was running and she was running after him, screaming his name while he either didn’t or couldn’t hear her. Eventually she couldn’t keep up, or she blinked and he vanished. But then a voice would sound behind her as she stood alone, panting, gasping for dry air — “Alice?” And she would turn and see him, only he was dressed in a pressed three piece suit instead of a faded flannel, his smile too sharp and his eyes too dark, and in spite of the way her lungs screamed she’d take off running again. He would call after her but it sounded like a taunt and not a plea, and just when she felt a hand wrapping around a fistful of her hair and pulling — she’d wake up.

The dream repeated itself three times before she resigned herself to a painfully early start to the day. For the best, perhaps. Her film would debut, appropriately, just after sunrise. Serena had never come back the night prior. She must have worked through the night. Alice drove her rental to the drive-in, stopping for coffee and breakfast to bring along, and found Serena holed up in the front office. She seemed almost surprised to see Alice there. Surprised and relieved. “Thought you’d be someone else,” she said as she accepted the coffee. A question hung on Alice’s tongue, but died when one of the festival techs knocked on the office door asking for the access code to the projection booth.

She never did get to ask what Serena meant.

The film premiere was a pleasant success. Alice hadn’t expected much of a crowd so early in the morning, but the turnout was respectable, even if it was clear a good number of attendees were there only as fans of her late husband’s work. It wasn’t about them, or for them, really. She was content and that was what mattered. Still, she couldn’t shake the way Serena seemed… off. There was an odd distance between them in the projection booth while the film ran, and each time Alice looked over at her, her eyes were locked on the screen. That wasn’t what was odd, though. Her brows were pinched and she was clearly chewing on the inside of her cheek — things Alice could write off as an artist and a festival chair being overly critical of her own work on display, if it wasn’t for the way she was, ever so slightly, shaking where she stood.

At a party that night, sipping on celebratory champagne as she chatted with the other filmmakers and artists from the festival — even Barry Wheeler, there with his latest clients, paid her work a polite compliment — she could almost forget about the strangeness of the morning. Until, back at her place, Serena insisted on sleeping on the couch and leaving her bed to Alice. She was too restless, she said. Didn’t want to disturb Alice’s sleep. Only when Alice got up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night, every light outside the bedroom was on.

She flew home at the end of the week with a promise to keep in touch, to visit soon, to make up for the distance. Promises that rang hollow. Serena had been pulling away from her since the festival and for as much as Alice told herself the other woman was just busy with her work, the familiarity of an empty bed and the weight of things unspoken nagged at her. Something had happened that night. Something that Serena wouldn’t — or couldn’t — tell her.

They called each other once or twice a week. Serena came to New York just before Christmas, and they walked around Central Park holding hands and kissed under the snowfall. But back in the apartment, Alice found her in Alan’s old office in the middle of the night, mumbling to herself about spiders and darkness until Alice clicked the light on. Sleepwalking. She’d been dealing with it on and off for months and her doctor thought it was stress related. After that night it didn’t happen again. Or at least, Alice didn’t notice.

Time between calls stretched. Texts were less and less frequent. Alice went back for the arts festival the following year, with none of her own work to show but a lingering desire to support someone she cared about. Still — this time she stayed in a motel. But they talked like old friends and Alice stayed over for a night when it was offered. Serena had blown up and framed one of the photographs Alice took of the desert the year prior, and it hung in her living room between the windows.

Weeks turned to months, and then a year. Then two. Then another and another, and Facebook revealed that Serena got married. A Vegas elopement, just her and a woman Alice had seen before in infrequently posted pictures. She sent a card and flowers, received a thank you text and a vague suggestion of meeting up the next time they were in New York.

That was the last she heard from Serena.