He caught sight of his cuffed workman’s chinos landing an inch above his chukka boots. How far I’ve come, he thought.

“You’re not at the meeting,” Blithe posed, preempting Cooper from saying the same thing.

“Nah, got some shit to do, don’t need Marcus lecturing me on fantasy this particular little afternoon.”

“True that,” Blithe said, although he loved the lectures. He just didn’t want to sully his ideas by having to present them to producers. Not while they were in their tender phase.

“Gotta get back to it,” he told Cooper, before spending the next hour watching videos of galloping horses and wishing he were out in the smoke-filled night, at the edge of the frontier, in another, simpler time.

When he finished “working,” Blithe sat in his car and called Saul. He said he was feeling lost.

~PAUSE IN NARRATIVE REPORT~

I marveled at this ability to simply state one’s complex feelings to a partner without hiding them.

~NARRATIVE REPORT CONTINUED~

A few days later, Blithe was getting ready to head over to his childhood home for Sunday lunch. His phone echoed violin notes through the silent condo. He picked it up off his tan couch, where he’d fallen asleep the night before, dreaming of soft vines growing out of the ocean and crawling up the balconies toward his condo. It was Saul.

“Hey, babe.”

“What are you up to today?”

He walked over to the wall tapestry that his parents brought him from Morocco, tracing the curves with his eyes.

“Not much. I have to finish up the Arrow-Line for pre-auditions next week.”

“Can’t you just call it a pilot? We’ve talked about this. I don’t speak Elemental.”

Elemental Studio’s quirky vocabulary matched its desire to evade some of the stock features of the industry.

“Okay, sorry.”

“I’m calling to see if you wanted to take a rollerblading break a little later?”

“Oh, I’m going over to my parents’ house. They just got back from Rome.”

A pause as Saul waited to be invited.

“Want to come with me?”

“Actually, I have brunch plans.”

“Oh, okay.”

Blithe made sure to sound disappointed, even though he wanted his parents to himself for the afternoon.

Outside, the palms swayed.

Blithe pulled up to the two-story stucco house shaded by acacia trees. He considered sleeping there that night, full-on digging into a cavern of parental comfort. He got out of the car and for moment forgot how much he’d wanted to leave this house, how it always seemed embarrassingly small in comparison to the Thousand Oak manses with their pool houses and meditation gardens.

He could smell sun on asphalt, dryer sheets tumbling nearby, mystical, opening the threshold to the past that came before the Before—a time when discomfort did not have a clear and fixable label.