I stare down at the napkin, at the brutal evidence that my fingers know what the rest of me refuses to admit. That I’m stuck on a memory, on a moment, on a person. That I’d been so terribly wrong about what we had.

“To forgetting,” I mutter as I throw back the whisky, but there isn’t enough alcohol in the world to make me forget her.

A Webcomic

By Oliverartssometimes

Episode 1: The Meet-Awkward
(Christmas Eve, 10:18 a.m.)

Uploaded: December 26, 2021

Creator note: Hi everyone! I’m excited so many of you have found your way to this first episode of my new webcomic! Just a friendly reminder that this is not a romance. Readers expecting a happy ending should proceed with caution. For more original characters, fan art, and commissions, follow me on Instagram @Oliverartssometimes.

There is almost an inch of snow on the ground, and I’m crying in a bookstore.

The tears and the snow are mostly unrelated.

Crying on a snow day feels particularly unjust. Snow days are for freedom and magic and joy, not publicly wiping snot onto your sleeve while you sob in the Gold Room at Powell’s City of Books.

This is supposed to help, I think as I look up at the floor-to-ceiling shelves in the graphic novel section. Why isn’t this helping?

I’ve only been in Portland for a month, but I’ve already come to this city-block-size bookstore a dozen times, sought solace in the color-coded rooms housing approximately one million books. After my onboarding meeting at Laika, where one of the animation bros called my grad school thesis short film—which had earned me praise and accolades from all my professors—trite and immature, I went straight to the Rose Room and sat among the children’s books with their beautiful illustrations. After my first seventy-hour workweek, I retreated to the Blue Room, grabbed an armful of romance novels, and sat on the floor reading for an entire Sunday until I forgot the real world completely. And after my direct supervisor ridiculed my work publicly and told me he “didn’t want to regret hiring a young girl,” I cried in the bathroom, yes. But then I took the MAX to Powell’s, went to the café with my bullet journal, ordered a large iced coffee, and hashed out a new plan for how I’d work harder, be better, and prove them all wrong.

And, of course, when my mom called me on Christmas Eve morning to tell me she wasn’t coming to visit, I came here, to the graphic novels of the Gold Room. Yet even the graphic novels aren’t helping.

I am still crying in an empty aisle at nine in the morning.

“I guess you’re my only friend now,” I tell the footstool next to me. “You won’t abandon me at Christmas like my mother, will you?”