I was dreaming of California again

The radiator knocked twice, then fell silent. Another sleepless night in my sixth-floor walkup, watching shadows walk across water-stained wallpaper.

I was dreaming of California again. Memories I can’t explain, memories I never wanted to see again. But I dreamt them all the same.

The air conditioner in the corner sputtered its last, joining the radiator in mechanical death. Perfect timing. A heatwave in December, and now this. Everything dying at once, like somebody upstairs was pulling plugs for fun.

Through the window, neon from Wong’s Laundromat painted my ceiling in sickly purple. Three months ago, I’d watched a man get stabbed in the alley below. He’d stumbled two blocks before collapsing. The police never found the knife.

My phone buzzed. Unknown number.

"The package arrives tomorrow," a voice said. Wrong number, probably. But something in the way they said 'package' made me think of Marina Beach, of buried duffel bags, of why I’d left the coast in the first place.

I hung up without speaking. The radiator knocked again, this time like it meant it.

And yeah, I still have the pictures. The photographs and the drawings. Of course I do. Never one to miss an opportunity to hurt myself, looking at things I could’ve had.

I keep them in a shoebox under loose floorboards, wrapped in wax paper like that’ll somehow preserve them. Amateur sketches of the pier, polaroids from that weekend in Monterey. The ones from before everything went sideways. Before the coast guard, before the headlines.

The box smells like sea salt now, though that’s probably just my brain playing tricks. Hasn’t been within five hundred miles of an ocean in three years. Funny how memory works – you think you’re done with something, then your mind conjures up the smell of kelp and diesel fuel at three in the morning.

The radiator gave up its ghost entirely. In the new silence, I could hear my upstairs neighbor pacing. Back and forth, back and forth, like he was counting steps to somewhere. I wondered if he had a box of his own up there, full of things he couldn’t quite throw away.