You know by now I left you a trail. See, I’m not entirely without sentiment, as you might have thought. 

First: A pair of men’s black glasses near the rocky ledge of a waterfall. They were my father’s, and I miss them, but he did love waterfalls. Always made us pump our little legs as we walked up and up, grumbling if we dared, and then he would sigh. Look kids, isn’t this worth it?

Was it? That’s a question I always have a hard time answering. It’s something we talked about during those three nights, looking at the stars from your two-chair porch and wondering about the things people wonder together when they’re wondering about each other.

Then, I left my purple Crocs on a peninsula jutting out over a crystal-clear lake in the middle of nowhere. You pretended to think they were cute, but being ten years older than me, I could tell you thought I was dressing like a kid. Acting like a kid, living wherever, taking off whenever I wanted to go. 

A red mountain biking glove waving from a branch. They were borrowed. I wanted to learn because of the way you talked about it, but I was terrible. Walked my bike over roots and rocks, panting. I used my feet to stop myself and came out covered in dust and dirt and blood. That pain to pleasure calculation of worthiness. 

Another glove, this one gray, by a receding reservoir coated in algae. Bodies of water with rings instead of horizons are my thing—your observation about me. You said I might seem like I wanted to float away but really wanted a boundary. You thought this was clever. Also, you were hoping I’d agree and say you could be that boundary. I inflated the stand-up paddle board I bought my first month on the road whenever I saw a place to put it. Sometimes I brought rosé in a can, sipping it while watching trout jump out, look around, dive back under. Sometimes I dropped it in after a hike and lay on its bumpy surface in the water, making slow circles as the current dictated and only knowing where I was once I opened my eyes. 

A sheathed knife, well, this I needed. So I got clever and put a phone number on a torn off piece of notebook paper and scotch taped it to a trailhead map, asking for the knife’s return if it was found. But it isn’t my real number because I can’t have whoever calling me. Up on that peninsula, a man who’d come from a canoe, barefoot in the brambles, asked if I was alone. There aren’t any right answers for a woman to say to that, so you see why I needed the knife.

A broken cabin hidden high in the Aspen trees. This, of course, I didn’t build and then chop its middle and leave it for you. But I did contemplate this place for a long time, who had lived there, what they had been escaping, who might have looked for them, and if they were ever found. 

Though I’m not sure of my own, I wanted to know your commitment, even though you already made it clear you wanted me to move in with you and stop living in my truck on the road. You were taking pictures of food in a bar in a town in Washington State, the furthest northwest I could get. I made a sarcastic remark, but then you explained you were a content creator for a hospitality company in the Pacific Northwest. What can I say? I was intrigued.

I have a real job too, one I can do from the road, any place I can grab an electrical charge and some Wi-Fi. I’m charming with my smile and tattoos. Old people think I’m cute and buy me dinner in towns all over Colorado, Idaho, Montana. They tell me they wish their grandchildren would go on adventures like I’m doing, while my own mother brings a hand to her forehead, ceremoniously lamenting how she’ll never have grandchildren. She’s the one who taught me to live on the road. A daughter of the military, she never lived in one place and didn’t believe in airplanes, eventually leaving my father, even though he also liked the road plenty. He just happened to also like his La-Z-Boy chair, his living room. 

You texted me this past week asking when I was coming back or if you could fly to me. You aren’t afraid to be direct about what you want. You’ve lived forty years already, and you said you don’t meet someone like me every day. Which was flattering, but also it was said to me a lot. Though I admit it sounded different coming from you. 

Finally I told you that you needed to follow the trail. 

what trail?

C’mon. Lost items? can u give me a hint?

But I think, if you are the right person for me, you will leave your nice apartment behind and your king-sized bed with the softest gray comforter where we curled ourselves into oblivion, and you will look in the places no one expects. You will find detritus left by others, false clues, red herrings, but you will grow desperate, collect it all anyway. In the final place, where I haven’t landed yet, you will present them to me, these lost things of strangers that are not mine. Still, I will listen to the valiant tales of you walking over mountains and into lakes. I will let these things tell our story and place them on our mantle. Lighters and dusty blankets and trucker hats. And the real things I left behind? That story will walk away on its own in primary color plastic shoes toward a splintered cabin, finding its way with crooked glasses, any fingerprints left hidden inside mismatched gloves. 

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Carrie Esposito was thrilled to be a 2023 Bread Loaf Fiction Scholar. Her stories have been published in The Georgia Review, Literary Mama, Ruminate Magazine, The Forge Literary Magazine, A Door is a Jar Literary Magazine, Monkey Bicycle, The MacGuffin, King Ludd’s Rag by Malarkey Books, Pif Magazine, Everyday Fiction, Mused, the Ms. Aligned anthology, and in SLAB Litmag where her story won first place in the William Boggs fiction contest. She has been interviewed for the Short Story Today podcast, and she has essays in Litro Magazine and The Times Union. Her stories have been a finalist for the William Van Dyke Short Story Prize, the Curt Johnson Prose Awards, the Grist ProForma contest and have received an Honorable Mention from Glimmer Train. She has poetry published in Tipton Poetry Journal, Nostalgia Press, and Porcupine Literary. She is a fiction editor at The Weight Journal, an Educational Consultant in the NYC schools and a professor of Global Humanities. You can find her on Twitter(X)/Instagram @CarrieBEsposito and on her website www.carrieesposito.com.