Sleepless Chapter 8: Enter Celine

March 2020, Dublin, California

“Alright, Jeremy I need you to get going.” I said.

Jeremy had spent the night at my place after a night out in Oakland. A night out typically consisted of drinks at the Broxon and breakfast at Denny’s before heading back home and watching a film. The previous night was no different.

“What time does she fly in?” replied Jeremy.

“She flies in at 2pm.”

“Got it okay. How do you feel?”

“Not too bad. Pretty excited.”

“Okay, well, good luck man.”

The truth was, I was not excited. I was trying to revive a corpse of a relationship that died in New York close to a year and a half prior. But I felt I owed Celine something. Once upon a time she had flown to San Francisco to visit me and win me back, and I responded with coldness for the sake of continuing on an Evangelical Christian path and not pursuing a relationship from a time when I had all but abandoned God.

It was a one for one deal in my mind. She had the blow of San Francisco, and I had the blow of New York. We were even, and we could try again. But this was not the sentiment I shared with my mother two days prior over the phone:

“Well are you at least excited for her to visit?”

“Sometimes, but part of me just wants to tell her not to come, cut my losses, return to being who I actually am after two years of this and spend actual vacation days in New York, hanging out with the guys who were actually there for me.”

“Well, I can’t say I don’t understand that. But Arthur, you’ve already bought her plane ticket, so you may as well try just one more time to know for sure.”

“Alright.”

I spent time tidying my section of the house: my bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen, and I bought flowers and candles for the occasion. I went to the gym shortly after and grabbed an Uber for the 45 minute ride to SFO. I had left at 1pm with an eta for 1:45 on the dot, giving me fifteen minutes before touchdown and plenty of time to wait for her to step off the plane and leave the terminal.

I gazed upon the Bay from the San Mateo Bridge seeing the aqua blue waves crashing into each other along the boring sprawl of grey concrete, a measurable distance from the Bay Bridge looking far more grandiose. I had looked upon these waters countless times in the past, and they felt unnerving in this instance. They felt far less like home and felt as if they were hiding some marine horror from the deep that was poised to strike.

Time seemed to stop in this short ride. I possessed a distorted view of time when still on the bridge, and once we crossed over to San Mateo County, driving past the Facebook compound, I managed to claw for a grasp of time once more. We weren’t far now. Menlo Park is a hop, skip, and a jump away from Millbrae, and I began to brace myself for some bizarre reason.

I held a necklace in my hand: one of multiple gifts I was going to give her throughout her ten days in California. I gripped it with a sweaty palm, while the other hand was working to fend off the bitterness I had been plagued with for over a year now.

I wanted to believe that the bitterness from both of us could be put to rest, that we’d finally claw off the muck that suffocated our bond and finally return to how we were six years prior. I wanted it to be real, but her adoption of harsher realities and anxieties of time had made me far more of a pessimist than I ever had been.

I’d run the Amador trail every morning in Dublin feeling as if I doubled down on weight vests, when all I wore was a t-shirt with sweatpants, feeling that I was carrying a corpse.

I didn’t know if I had the hope in me any longer to attempt yanking victory from the jaws of defeat, and yet there I was on my way to the airport as if I still possessed this spirit: sleepwalking into the next battle that bears no glory.

I was in San Bruno, one town South of Millbrae when I received a text from Celine saying she had just landed. It was only 1:35, and her flight had landed 25 minutes early. I began to sense a heightened anxiety within my being, as I saw another ten minutes were left on my ride in progress. I hoped that she would take ten minutes to get off the plane, so I wouldn't leave her in disappointment by not being there waiting for her at the airport. She was always very sensitive with these kinds of things.

At 1:46 I jumped out of the uber, and caught my bearings in SFO.

“I’m at the fucking Starbucks, and you’re not here.” lit up my phone display.

My heart froze.

“Your plane was almost a half hour early. I’m literally standing in front of the Starbucks in the terminal right now, and I don’t see you.” I replied.

I didn’t receive a reply, and It prompted me to call her.

“Where are you?”

“I’m at the Starbucks Arthur, the Starbucks in front of United, and you’re not here,” replied Celine before hanging up the phone.

I looked around and realized the uber driver had dropped me off at the wrong terminal for United. I had even specified international arrivals as opposed to domestic, and he had dropped me off at the wrong place without my noticing.

I began to sprint furiously through the airport to find her, making a fool of myself amidst the mild mannered tourists and tech workers who were coming for a visit or coming home. Nothing about this felt romantic. This didn’t feel like some cut scene out of “Love Actually” or any other ridiculous romcom that placed significance on encounters in airports.

After five minutes of running, I saw another Starbucks in the distance, and I ceased my sprinting gait. I was not going to see my fiancé for the first time in over year disheveled and disoriented. I fixed my hair, my hat, and my clothes and made my way with a firm step towards the Starbucks where I saw her waiting in line with a stoic look on her side profile.

She was dressed in black leather pants and white nike sneakers with a wool pink top, coat in hand, suitcase on the ground, and long blonde curls tied up partially into a pony tail with the bulk of the front of her hair falling onto her shoulders. Her eyes were of her Russian blood, the Russian cat eyes of her grandmother, but the remainder of her face belonged to Elizabethan England, with her sloped nose and angular jaw. These were features that granted her Shakespearean casting of Lady Percy and Lady Macbeth. There was danger in her, and there was fury in her. Fury that knows no bounds.

I walked over to her with a last minute dose of joy that came from the stocked up feelings of resuming a record that abruptly stopped six years prior, with only two instances of placing the needle once more. It would resume again. This joy was met with that boundless fury.

“Celine,” I said while attempting to hug her.

“Uh, no, don’t touch me. You were supposed to be here.”

The joy quickly faded.

“Celine, your flight was early.”

“No, it wasn’t Arthur, you said you’d be here, and you weren’t fucking here.”

“Celine, I’m sorry I wasn’t here earlier, but your flight was supposed here at two.”

“I don’t care Arthur, I had to wait here, and you weren’t here. Why are you sweating?”

“I had to run. The Uber drove me to the wrong terminal as well.”

“Of course he fucking did, what is it with you and these things?”

Celine grabbed her Starbucks order after a curt, British “thank you.”

“Well, let’s get the fuck out of here then.” she demanded.

I realized as we exited the Starbucks, that in my stunned state from this hostility that I had dropped the necklace I had for her under the baked good display of the airport Starbucks. Worse than this,I realized I had dropped my wallet in the run from terminal to terminal. I fought off the onset of despair and panic to hold myself together and find it.

“Wait here.” I said.

I began to run for roughly 80 meters before being stopped by a black man of sunny disposition and calm aura, who held my wallet in his hand and asked, “is this you?”

I let out a gargantuan sigh of relief before briskly marching towards him and grabbing it from him while releasing the tension in my being. I didn’t thank him due to my hurry to get back to Celine to diffuse her anger and salvage something out of her visit. I regret not thanking him to this day.

“What the hell was that about?”

“Nothing, let’s go.”

“Where are we going?”

“To the BART.”

“I see.”

Walking to the BART station in SFO was a long walk of painful silence coming up to the yellow line train with a terminus at Antioch.

“And this is going to take us directly to your place?”

“No we have to make one change in West Oakland.”

“Great.”

We boarded the old car from the 1970s and sat down in a two seat slot while watching the car emerge from the airport for an above ground trip that would last until it reached San Francisco to submerge itself underground.

“I just don’t understand why you couldn’t be really early.”

“I was going to be really early. A half hour early.”

“Yeah, but you fucking weren’t were you?”

“Your plane was supposed to be here at 2. I left to be there at 1:45, which was supposed to give me a half hour by the time you’d get off the plane and get out of the gate.”

“Well I wasn’t out by then was I Arthur? I had to fucking wait for you alone.”

“I’m sorry you had to wait alone, but I didn’t cause your plane to land 30 minutes early. Are you seriously going to blame me for this?”

“You should have come even earlier. I had to wait alone Arthur. I was standing there like a fucking idiot after looking for you everywhere. I legitimately was very excited when the plane landed, like finally, okay, we’re going to be together. But you weren’t there.”

It was beginning to set in that I had squandered a very valuable opportunity. My head began to spin, and nausea ensued.

“I had to call the fucking Uber in New York cause your stupid phone died.” barked Celine.

I had 75% on my battery for that phone, and it died when we stepped outside of JFK, as if the universe was conspiring against us. I’ll never forget that gut punch.

“That wasn’t my fault Celine.”

“Oh of course, nothing is ever your fault is it Arthur?”

I started to get that same feeling I had when she had visited New York. I could hear the words she spoke echoing in my head from then superimposed on her rage now. I remember exactly how it was that I felt, and I remember the feeling of crushing defeat that came as a package deal.

What was worth it at this point? In truth, I felt that even if I had shown up on time, there would have been something else she’d find wrong. In fact, I knew this. She had grown so finicky, prissy, and petty since I had first known her. All that time away gridlocked her into bitterness now all focused on me.

“Are you not going to fucking say anything?”

My demeanor had changed. I was no longer open, loving, and hopeful. I was stoic, cold, and borderline rude. I saw in my reflection of the window of the BART car passing under the Bay from Embarcadero station to West Oakland station, and I saw the same eyes I knew I possessed in New York in the first incident.

They were as dead as dead eyes can be, liberated from any burden of hope on one’s back, smothered into coldness, still alive, and sauntering out of the morgue.

Those words echoed once more in my mind after six years, words that were not mine nor Celine’s.

“There is nothing to believe in. There is no need to believe.”

Briefly shuddering at the dilemma, I grasped some sentience once more without a care in the world after this remembrance.

“It’s not that fucking serious.” I thought.

“Who the fuck cares?” I thought.

Emerging on the other side of the Bay near the docks of the port of Oakland, my phone had signal once more. I swiped to an app called “Skyscanner” seeking a plane home for Celine the next day. The cheapest I could get back to London was $650.

“Honestly worth it at this point,” I thought to myself.

“Maybe this is what I needed. Maybe I just needed to tell her to fuck off once and for all. Maybe then, I can be free. Maybe then, I’ll be lifted from all of this. Maybe then, I’ll figure out what it was all for, bleeding all that blood away.” I thought once more.

“You’re not going to be all cold and stoic with me Arthur. I came all this way to see you, and now you think you can be all rude to me not speaking to me?” snapped Celine.

The train car doors opened to the above ground station on platforms one story above the neighborhood of West Oakland. West Oakland was an old neighborhood of Victorian houses that had turned into one of the roughest places in all of California. It was as if someone turned over Oakland’s couch and every miscellaneous person and item fell into this edge of the world. You’d find random rolling chairs, signs, and furniture in the middle of the street. You’d have a coffee shop next to an antiques store next to a crackhouse. Wild West.

“Listen if you don’t pipe the fuck down, I’m putting you back on a plane to London tomorrow.”

“You can’t afford to do that Arthur.”

“Yes I can. And frankly, it would be worth every fucking penny if you think you’re going to keep acting like this.”

“Act like what? Upset cause you weren’t at the fucking airport when you said you would be?”

“Your plane was fucking early. I can’t control the tailwind, and I couldn’t control it being early. I wasn’t going to show up to the airport a fucking hour early cause that’s fucking absurd. You can either get on the plane and go back home tomorrow, or you can get over it, moved passed it, and have a nice time. But I’m not going to have you have a go at me every five fucking minutes.”

She stopped dead in her tracks with several people eavesdropping not too far from us. Then she cracked a reluctant smile.

“Well, okay I suppose you’re right. I don’t want to go back. I want to stay here.”

Her demeanor shifted from furious to graceful as she boarded the BART car we’d take from West Oakland to West Dublin/Pleasanton station.

I sat down with her in a similar two person space, with her taking the window seat this time and myself taking the aisle seat. She gazed upon the city of Oakland for the first time, as the train went under ground to head towards Lake Merritt station.

She was so calm now, almost sheepish. She seemed to be enjoying herself. But that smile that cracked on her face disturbed me.

“Are you sick in the head or something?” I thought.

“After all this time, have you just wanted rudeness? Have you just wanted me to tell you off and put you in your place? Is that what you’ve wanted all this time? Is this what gets you off?”