The hammock was strung between two sturdy pine trees and the breeze was cool enough to raise the hair on her arms. But, she stayed outside long after the sun set, swaying, watching the skies as if for some sign.

Maya believed in signs, omens, those rare occurrences that come at such opportune moments that they seemed providential. One July fourth, instead of driving to the Narrows to see the fireworks, they had climbed up on the hood of his car and looked up at the stars, talking about how it would be when they got married. There were millions of fireflies in the fields that night, settled low over the soybeans. A few stars shot across the sky, but each time she had pointed them out to him, he had missed them.

Right there, that should have been a sign, a red flag warning her of danger. But, she didn’t see it. Later, as Maya came to accept the demise of their doomed relationship, she also embraced the reality that perhaps that night hadn’t been as magical for him as it had been for her. He hadn’t even seen the shooting stars, after all. As the old adage goes, hind sight is always 20/20.

That night under the stars they had talked of buying a hammock someday and had imagined lying wrapped together surrounded by a cool breeze just like the one now blowing her hair across her lips. As she brushed it back absentmindedly, she remembered him doing the same thing with the back of his finger, very gently. It always seemed to be the little things that had the most profound impact on her heart.

He had loved to hold her close, tucking her against his chest and thighs, entwining his legs with hers, wrapping his arms around her like a bow on a present. She would lie like that for hours, melting into him. This is what it felt like to be “One”, he’d said, to be “home”.

She had been in ecstasy, in love with the only man who ever came close to touching her soul. So, lying there together on the roof of his car, they had entrusted their yonder year wish to the wind, to be still holding each other close in the years to come, swaying under a starry sky in a hammock strung between two tall trees in the yard of a home they would buy down by the water, where they would live and sleep together, all the days of their lives.

But, as she came to learn, wishing something doesn’t always make it so. Five years later, long after that wishful night, she awoke one morning focused and determined. She knew what she had to do. After pulling on jeans and a sweater, she drove through the Cyprus swamp to an import store run by an Indian man who always smelled of birdseed.

She went there often to sort through the odd Balinese carvings she had taken to collecting. She looked for pieces carved by one family in particularly, delicate, pointed, feminine and serine. She had been told by Vijay, the proprietor of the store, that the master carver was a 105 year old grandfather, an ancient man practicing a dying art. She owned many of his pieces. Over the years, the artist had trained his sons, nephews and grandsons to find the satin or waru wood that had drifted onto the beaches. He showed them how to lean them one against the other and how to wait. As he worked, he’d glance over at the heap of wood to see what he could see. Eventually, a piece would call out to him. Then he would reach in to grab the log and the magic of sculpting would begin.

He’d sit on his stump in his sarong, lean the piece of wood against his bare chest and hold the other end with his brown callused feet. Finding the right tool among his pile, he'd move his hands over the crevices and around the curves, set his tool against the wood, take a deep breath and scrape downward. Before long, curls and chips covered his feet. When the piece was complete, he’d polished it golden.

Vijay traveled to the East twice a year to purchase merchandize for his store. He always came by the old man’s place to see what new pieces he had carved. He had many regular customers back in the States who would pay four times the price he paid the man for his artwork. The sight was in the bloodline, the skill in the hands. Other Balinese families carved figurines as well. But, none were as feminine or as delicate as the descendents of the ancient man whose work Maya cherished.

As the old man grew older, the younger men who had watched him over the years began to collect their own drift wood stacks and carve their own statues. Each artist carved a bit of himself into each piece and she became familiar with the subtle details that distinguished one man’s art from the next. Each time she fell in love with a statue she begged Vijay to tell her the story of when he had bought it and from whom and how he was related to the ancient one. Her collection grew, but her favorites remained those carved by the old man. His, she could never resist.

Today, she wasn’t looking for statues of sultry women with hair piled high on their heads and sarongs slung low on their hips. She was on the hunt to honor a memory. She instinctively walked past the furniture and decorative items to the far back of the warehouse, near the entrance to the greenhouse where bulbs were stacked in bins. There they were: cylinders of white macramé wrapped around teak wood, leaning against a display of large hammered silver bowls from Mexico. She had spent five years avoiding the places they had gone and lamenting the things they had said they’d do together. Today was different, she thought. She woke up knowing that she had to begin to live her life again, even if that meant doing the things they had dreamt of doing together alone.

The scent of hibiscus filled the air and the sprinkler came on in the adjoining greenhouse. A customer was asking for help in getting down a glass ball that was hanging from the metal rafter. Two men holding painted masks brushed past her speaking what she thought was German. But, nothing pulled her attention from the stack of hammocks. She knew she would have to buy one, hang it, force herself to lie in it and in some karmic way make peace with the past in order to claim her future. She reached out and grabbed the tallest one.

Inspecting the periphery of her yard, she chose two pine trees, tall and straight like sentinels watching over the wide river, looking as though they had seen centuries transpire. It was the perfect spot to hang the hammock, but weeks past before she worked up the courage to lie in it. She’d come out in the evenings to watch the sunset after setting the last washed dish in the rack to drip dry. Leaning against one of the trees, she’d wrap her arm around it and unconsciously swing the teak bar of the hammock. She couldn’t bring herself to sit in it. Not yet, she thought. Five years was long enough for some things to fade into oblivion and long enough for others to grow to fruition. But, five years was hardly enough time for Maya to stop loving Philip. Three hundred years couldn’t take that from her. This, too, would take time, she assured herself.

Throughout that summer she couldn’t lie in the hammock without thinking of him. After watching the sunset, she would often fall asleep beneath the stars and dream of Philip dressed in white linen. She had always thought the crisp whiteness would contrast his dark complexion well, but he had never worn linen when they were together.

She had been right. He looked handsome as he leaned on one elbow, gazing down on her sleeping face in a hammock he wished he had helped her hang. He touched her cheek with the back of his forefinger and she opened her eyes. Looking up into his treasured face, her eyes conveyed the depth of her love and the fortitude of her devotion. It had been years since he had seen her last and her loveliness moved him noticeably. God, she took his breath away. How could he have ever thought of living his life without her?

Two boys were laughing and calling to her excitedly, scrambling up the hill to show their mother a gecko that they had cornered down on the sandy beach below. Philip, hearing their voices, snapped his head in the direction of the fence. It hadn’t occurred to him when he looked her up that she may have married and had children in his absence. He suddenly regretted his rash decision to come to her unannounced and began to lift himself out of the hammock. She could see the panic in his eyes and quickly pushed herself upright as well, her hand grabbing for his as she did so. Although his instinct was to pull it away from her given the apparent situation, he froze as he saw the boys come around the azalea bushes by the fence. Philip’s heart beat against his chest madly as he gaped at the little dark boys looking up at him with his own mother’s eyes.

The gecko wiggled furiously in the little boy’s grip. But, the child had forgotten the tiny creature. Who was the strange man standing beside his mother, his hand clasped in hers? Philip couldn’t take his eyes off the boys. He wanted to ask Maya whose children these were but could not find the right words. Finally, he turned to her with a look of utter confusion, pain and pleading. For a moment, she was taken back by his expression, having seen it before, when he had tried to explain to her why he had to leave. She did not know where to begin, what to say or exactly how to best say it. But, as she raised her hand to his face to try to explain, she saw the comets shower across the sky above his shoulder.

Dreams have an unforgiving sense of irony about them she conceded as she pushed herself out of the hammock and walked barefoot through the dew drenched lawn, yawning, towards the cottage by the river where she lived alone. No twin boys with dimples in only one cheek like her sister and Asian eyes like his mother raced each other, laughing and screaming. No loving Philip in white linen, his warmth beside her as he leaned down to collect a discarded toy, calling after the rambunctious boys in his deep steady voice to be careful with the glass doors.

Alone, she slipped into her bed piled high with pillows where she hoped to find yet one more night of solace. Between the warm fleece sheets she had discovered since his departure, she sank into her nook in the center of the mattress. Staring at the ceiling, she recalled a time when she didn’t used to sleep in the middle, like a queen ruling her own domain. She would cling to the edge of the bed, keeping to her side, as if she were subconsciously waiting for him to return. Finally, she recognized what she was doing and forced herself to break the habit and to begin thinking of herself as detached from the couple she had hoped they would always be.

The truth is that old habits do die hard. Feels like a damn curse letting go of them. The blessings come when we realize that by adopting new habits we’ve altered our perception. It was no different for Maya. Eventually, she came to see her bed as her own; her home as her own; her life, as her own. Like the first sip of morning coffee that she always drank black, she swallowed the bitter reality that he wasn’t coming back no matter how much she wished that he would. She was awakened and alerted to the truth. He was gone. She was alone. Alone, in that she was without him. And that was that. It was acceptable. Life goes on. The art is in the living. Or so Maya tried to convince herself.

So, like a connoisseur, she shopped for sheets, warm and soft like his embrace had been. Sheets that would give her that same familiar safe feeling as when she had curled up against him. She found them, finally. And they helped. She rubbed one foot against the other instinctively and noted that sometimes it’s the simplest of things that offer ease during the most difficult of times. As she relaxed, absorbing the comfortable softness of the fibers, she acknowledged that she felt she didn’t needed him anymore, at least not to warm her feet. Wanting him was another story. Since purchasing her ever warm sheets of fleece, however, her feet were never cold. It wasn’t much, she smiled, but it was something. And some days, something’s all we’ve got to get us through.

Some days, though, it is hardly enough. How many nights had she stared up at that ceiling as she did now, letting the tears roll off her cheeks to flood onto her hair cascading across the pillow, the very hair he would sleep on? How many weeks, months, and now years had she endured the nights without him? How many more would she find herself consumed with memories of him or gnawing longings for him? Sighing, she reached for the industrial sized jar of Melatonin, shook three 10 mg tablets into her hand and tossed them back with the glass of water sitting on her bedside table for just that purpose.

Rolling over, she picked up her book and began reading in earnest. She knew that she only had fifteen minutes, twenty at most, before the pills kicked in and she lost all consciousness of the world and of this agonizing, haunting pain. In the meantime, she desperately attempted to divert her conscious attention to happier thoughts. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, subjunctives, prepositions, words, sentences, paragraphs, pages compiling the chapters of the stories of vapid nothingness that she read until the blackness was good enough to come tuck in her beneath an eight hour blanket of a wonderfully deep, drugged numbness.