Page 48

Emily Bond

Sort of Seeing Someone

“Good morning, Moonie ,” says the love of my life, after we’ve been reunited for some time now.

“Good morning, Walter,” I say back.

Mornings in OB, with my favorite parrot-next-door, represent every good thing in life: brownies fresh out of the oven, the last pair of shoes on sale in your size, the soft black hoodie that’s been washed a thousand times.

I pour myself a cup of coffee on my patio and wave hello to Cassie.

Not much aboutmy morning ritual on Narragansett Avenue has changed since the first time around living here.

But the physical place where I enjoy it certainly has.

I may have a smaller yard and the sound of a chair scraping across a cement patio has been reduced to a mere figment of my imagination, but I still enjoy my one-on-one time with my French press, breathing in the salty sea air, and people-watching the free spirits who pass by the front gate.

I also enjoy thumbing through my People magazines.

That’s right, I resubscribed—and I whip out a freshly-sharpened pencil to tackle the crossword every single time.

One new aspect to my morning ritual, however, is social media.

It’s been a while since I killed my MBA account, but I reactivated it under my new brand name, the company I share with Yas called Vine n’ Vibes.

I check it once every morning for incoming DMs in case anyone has customer service-related questions, or if there’s a good shot of one of our exclusive Tarot Card decks that I canrepost to the feed as user-generated content.

But other than that, I keep my distance from the platform and politely turn down requests from influencers for free products in exchange for posts.

Maybe in time Yas and I will be open to that, but our word-of-mouth, home-town traffic has proven to be just the right pace for our concept as we ramp up the new business.

On that note, we officially registered with the Ocean Beach Chamber of Commerce a couple months ago and did a ribbon-cutting ceremony shortly thereafter.

As of right now, there is no online shop component to Vine n’ Vibes and the concept is quite simple.

It’s a wine bar downstairs and a crystal healing shop upstairs.

Yas—with her incredible wine knowledge and even better people skills—manages the downstairs.

I manage the upstairs. Our hours are 11am to 11pm every day and I see a lot of the same faces who did yoga at Joe n’ Flow.

Though no sightings of Gavin, he’d be proud to know that we rehired a lot of the old staff and the place feels like family.

Speaking of ‘feeling like family,’ all of my products are still sourced from Angeline in Chicago, who has since befriended my mother and plans to retire and join her Sisterhood sometime in the next few years.

Other updates? I resigned as Nora’s nanny, giving her a piece of the inheritance money to put toward hiring someone good with anactual desire to make a career out of caring for children.

Luckily, that is all working out. Oh, and Olivia had her baby, a girl they named Sabrina.

She claims it’s a family name from Ted’s side. I call bullshit.

“I brought you a donut,” says a familiar voice coming through my front gate.

“Oh, hey there, stranger. Shouldn’t you be at work?” I ask Ollie.

“Phil’s on a Home Depot run now. I’ll meet him at the job site in an hour,” he explains.

Oh, and Ollie quit his job with WorldEnge and moved here, too. If I don’t sound surprised by that, it’s because I’m not. I’ve seen this scene before, he and I together, enjoying life in warmer weather. I’m so glad to report that it’s finally playing out.

After he bravely grabbed my hands after the panel discussion, I saw even more and I was honest about it. Here’s how it went:

“Do you want to know what I saw?” I asked as we shoveled cookie dough Blizzards into our mouths.

“Nope,” he said.

And we left it at that.

That said, his coolness then (and now) didn’t mean that I wasn’t hesitant about letting him back into my life.

He had to regain my trust, and in many ways, is still earning it.

But at least now he is crystal clear on the fact that I’m not changing who I am, and that included not going back to Chicago or dating him long distance if he really wanted to give “us” a try.

I urged him not to change who he is either.

If putting down roots in the Swedish neighborhood of Chicago is what he had in mind, then by all means, I wanted him to lay those down.

But the more he thought on it, the more he realized that “plan” was nothing more than a perceived safety net.

So he abandoned it in the name of…sort of seeing someone.

The thing was, I didn’t want to be the sole reason he jumped the Chicago ship after WorldEnge told Ollie theyhad no long-term jobs in San Diego available for a transfer.

As such, I asked him all the questions I know a guy like him would consider upon embarking on a cross-country move with no real plan.

“Where will you live? What will you do? Who will take over as Acting Civil Engineer at The Brockmeier?” Nothing regarding us or our relationship.

Not surprisingly, he had thought through all of that already and made answering my rapid-fire questions look easy. “I’ll break my lease, I’ll find an apartment, and I’ll get a job when get a job—I’ve got a nest egg, remember?”

Even though Ollie didn’t need my help with any of that, I couldn’t resist sharing Phil Santos’ contact information with him once he arrived in OB for good.

The two met for Cali Burritos the following week and the rest was history.

Phil decided that a right-hand man like Ollie was exactly what he needed in order to finally leave his accounting job at the ad agency and pursue architecture full-time.

Though the job didn’t come with a 401K or a fancy dress code, Ollie’s been enjoying wearing a lot of Carhartt, going from project to project, and spending time working in houses with impeccable views.

Best part? No Lady in Red has hassled him yet.

Just the lady in black, who also happens to be his girlfriend again, me.

“Mmmm, a chocolate old fashioned. My favorite,” I say as I give Ollie a kiss before taking a huge bite of the pastry.

“What are you up to?” he asks.

“I’m going to do a quick pull.”

“One or three cards?” he asks, fully aware of how readings work these days.

“I’m feeling lazy, so probably just one cardtoday.”

“That’s not lazy at all,” he says. “With a one-card pull,you areselecting a single cardintuitively to gain insightinto a question or situation. I think that’s both smart and efficient. Or as people here like to say, rad .”

The way Ollie has been able to sync up his engineer brain with my mystic brain has been key to the success our relationship this time around.

“I know, but it’s just so tempting to want more clarification. I always say I’ll do a one-card reading, but then I go and pull another card. And then another card. Might as well do three,” I lament.

“Nah, be strong. Go with one card and honor that card’s medicine in the moment. Then remember, no matter what you pull, you’ve gotta just go with the flow sometimes.”

“Fortune cookie?”

“Nah. Learned it from this really smart girl I met when the stars aligned.”

Flattery aside, he’s right. Whatever card I pull, it’s about empowering myself with a specific energy to move forward with clarity. It’s like putting the right type of gas in your car, not just the cheapest.

With that, I just need to set my intention and ask my question.

I resist asking anything to do with my relationship with Ollie.

Truth be told, I could grab his hand right now get a decent pulse check on us.

Since we both know that, and are no longer using the cock block spray, we’ve agreed to limit our hand-holding and instead drape an arm around each other.

It’s been kind of fun actually finding other ways to show affection.

So, here it goes: are things going to work out for me in OB this time around?

I take a deep breath, let my fingers gravitate to a card, and flip one over.

“What you’d get?” Ollie asks, genuinely interested.

“The Wheel of Fortune,” I say, quite shocked.

“One of the most highly symbolic cards in the deck, it speaks to love, career, and finances,” Ollie reads straight from the guidebook.

I grab the resource book from him, granting myself the kindness to be honest about what it could mean, as I read through the rest of the description.

The Wheel of Fortune turns evermore, seemingly to communicate that life is made up of both good and bad times, and that the cycle is one that we cannot control.

It goes on to describe that if I’m in a rough patch now, I will find my way out—good luck and good fortune will make their return.

If things are in an up cycle, understand they’ll float back to normal in time.

Suffice to say, cherish the blissful moments, be optimistic when it comes to hard times, and have faith that the universe will ultimately take care of your situation in the best way possible.

“So, what’s your interpretation of the card?” Ollie asks.

As I evolve my gift, I know I can’t just make a pull, look it up in a book, and go on with my day. I have to fine-tune my intuitions. So I concentrate hard before I come up with an answer that feels good.

“That there may, after all, be bad days. But with the right people, in the right place, there certainly are… no worries. ”

The End