“What Comes After” by Esther Launstein

He didn’t show.

He never did.

She sat in the same chair, at the same table, in the same coffee shop they used to meet at every week. Winter winds blew swirling snow past the frosted windows as the grandfather clock in the corner ticked closer to ten o’clock in the morning. It had been an hour since he texted saying he couldn’t come—busy with work. There was a world full of decent excuses, and yet he chose the same one every time. Recycled it like a plastic baggy until there was nothing left to salvage.

But she stayed anyway, knowing that there was no one that cared anymore. Refill after refill of hot chocolate that had become tasteless and cold in her mouth, and she wondered, as the moments passed by, when she had become so achingly alone. When had the world decided to leave her behind?

Perhaps it had always been that way. Nobody had ever held her hand, helped her along the bumpy roads of existence. But someone was always there. Somebody was always “available” if needed. Not wanted, not craved—needed. No—it hadn’t always been this way.

It had to have been new, as she would have noticed by now—would have recognized this feeling of absolute loneliness that ate away at her day after isolated day.

She shifted uncomfortably in the wooden chair, and it croaked loudly as she stared out the window. People passed by the shop, laughing and enjoying the snow. They spun wildly in their magnificent freedom, not caring that mere feet away, she was turning to dust from the inside.

She stared at the darkened screen of her phone, the message to him already having been read.

No problem. Maybe another time, she had written.

But there would be no other time. Just as there was no one else left for her to call or text. Everyone else had moved on with their lives; they had families, friends, and extraordinary careers worthy of a story she was unable to write. She was utterly and horrifically void of inspiration and ideas. And she yet again found herself wondering when it had become so. How had someone with so much fire burned out so quickly?

It was in that coffee shop—the one she always went to—that she came to an ugly, terrifying realization: she was not the fire, not a fearsome flame burning bright and persistent, consuming anything that dared stand in her way. She was, instead, the dusty ashes. She was the remains of her failed and broken dreams—the charred remnants of everyone else’s successes. She was dark and quite shakable in her missed chances and unfueled future. She had never been the flames; only the thing that came after, watching as the inferno of life travelled on and scattered her to the wind. A sooty, infallible afterthought of everyone else’s lives.

And she was so, so sick of blowing away in a wind that should have ignited something in her.

Gripping the sides of the chair, she pushed up onto steady legs.

And for the first time in years, when she glanced at her pale hands, there was no ash dusting her palms. Because amidst the ashes, there had been sparks.

And now they were flames.

Esther Launstein is planning to double major in English and Creative Writing & Literature with the hopes of writing or editing impactful stories.