Sedona booked the ticket to Santa Barbara on a Tuesday.

Denver was cold that morning, the kind of cold that didn’t just sit on the skin but seemed to move through her bones, settling in the places where sadness had already made a home. Outside her apartment window, the mountains stood pale and blue beneath a washed-out sky. They had become her witnesses – her quiet, immovable companions.

She had come to Denver because she needed to breathe somewhere Matthew had never been after a depressive episode.

California had become too crowded with him, especially Santa Barbara. Every street had a memory. Every beach had his laugh buried somewhere beneath the waves. Every liquor store, every gas station, every corner where he had once disappeared for hours drugged out on heroin carried the weight of all the things she had survived loving him.

Matthew had stayed in California. Yet again, he had disappeared under the veil of his heroin addiction.

They had been together on and off since high school. Back then, Matthew had been all crooked smiles, wild black hair with glistening sea salt eyes. He was a boy who would throw rocks at her window just to ask if she wanted to walk to the beach. He wrote her love notes in class on crumbled pieces of paper he sprayed with cologne he had stolen from his dad. He kissed her behind the gym. He told her she was the only person who ever made him feel like he wasn’t crazy about another love-the drug he couldn’t kick.

For months, Sedona had lost track of him. This wasn’t anything new. Matthew was always somewhere, traveling to Mexico with a fake ID, chasing some shadow only he could see. Sometimes he’d turn up after days with excuses that made no sense and somebody else’s car. Sometimes he’d call her crying. Sometimes he’d swear he was sober; swear it with that dry, crackly heroin voice she wanted so badly to believe.This time felt different-the silence had edges. She called her best friend, Kerstin.

Kerstin answered on the third ring. “Girl, what’s wrong?”

Sedona sat on the edge of her bed, staring at her laptop screen. A flight to Santa Barbara glowed back at her.

“I’m going to find him,” Sedona said.

“Matthew?” Kerstin sighed, not in judgment, but in exhaustion. She was still in California, still in Santa Barbara, close enough to the wreckage. She knew Matthew, but she also knew Sedona. She knew the whole sad, tangled history.

“Sedona…”

“I know,” Sedona said quickly. “I know what you’re going to say.”

“What am I going to say?”

“That he’s probably with some girl.”

Kerstin was quiet again.

Sedona laughed once, bitterly. “He told me he got sober.”

“Did you believe him?”

Sedona looked out at the crisp, Zen mountains of Denver she knew would never be her home.

“I wanted to.”

That was the truth. Wanting had always been the problem. She wanted the boy from high school. She wanted the Matthew who sang badly in the car and kissed her forehead when she cried. She wanted the version of him who had not been swallowed by needles, lies, and dirty motel rooms. So, she booked the ticket. For two months, the ticket sat in her email like a sordid promise.

Sedona and Kerstin talked about it constantly. They talked while Sedona walked through stores in Denver, holding sweaters against her body in dressing room mirrors. They talked while Kerstin drove through Santa Barbara, passing palm trees, stucco buildings, and glimpses of ocean so beautiful it seemed cruel.

“What if he’s just dating somebody?” Kerstin said one afternoon.

Sedona stood in the candle aisle of a shop, smelling something labeled mountain rain.

“Then I’ll feel stupid.”

“You won’t feel stupid.”

“I’ll feel stupid,” Sedona said. “But I’d rather feel stupid than wonder forever.”

Kerstin softened. “I get that.”

Sedona bought the candle. She bought a slimming black dress too, though she didn’t know why. It wasn’t fancy, but simple. Something she imagined wearing when she saw Matthew again, so he would know she had become someone stronger.

Sedona imagined the trip so many times her imagination almost became real. She would land in Santa Barbara, and Kerstin would pick her up. They would get coffee first because Sedona would need something to do with her hands. Then, they would drive by the places Matthew used to go: –old apartments, beaches, friends’ houses. She wondered if someone would know something. Maybe someone would say, “Oh yeah, Matt? I saw him last week.” Maybe, somehow, she would find him. Maybe he would be thinner or a tad ashamed. He might even have gotten sober without her. She wouldn’t mind if he was with another girl-as long as he was alive.

Five days before the flight, Sedona woke up feeling strange. The Denver morning was bright, sunlight pouring over the mountains like gold. She made coffee and opened her closet. The black dress hung there, waiting. Her suitcase sat beneath it, half-packed. She was starting to get excited to see her love, again.

Her phone rang. It was Kerstin. Sedona smiled a little when she saw the name.

“Hey,” she answered with a glittered smile. The only sound she heard was silence. “Kerstin?”

Her best friend made a sound Sedona had never heard before. It wasn’t crying exactly. It was smaller and broken.

“Sedona…”

The coffee cup slipped slightly in Sedona’s hand.

“What?”

“I’m so sorry.”

“What happened?” Sedona whispered.

Kerstin started crying then. “Matt died of a heroin overdose.”

“No.”

Sedona’s body folded before she knew she was falling. The cup hit the floor and shattered, coffee spreading across the wood like blood. Her knees struck the ground.

Sedona started screaming. It tore out of her like something ancient. It was grief that had been living inside her for years and had finally found the door. It wasn’t a human sound. It was a sound from the bottom of the earth, from the deepest part of a woman who had loved a boy through every version of his destruction. Sedona screamed so loudly it seemed even God had to hear it. The stars themselves had to plugplugs their ears to drown out the pain of her high-pitched shrill. Kerstin stayed on the phone, crying her name, but Sedona was gone somewhere no one could follow.

In her mind, Matthew was seventeen again. He was barefoot on the beach, and he was laughing. Matthew was promising her forever with a cigarette behind his ear. Matthew was saying, “I’m sober, babe-I swear.” He was disappearing around a corner, but he was still coming back. He wasn’t gone into an abyss of death.

For the next five days, Sedona moved through the world like someone underwater. She didn’t cancel the ticket.

Kerstin asked once, “Are you still going to the airport?”

Sedona stared at the email confirmation on her phone.

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I know.” She didn’t cancel it, and the ticket remained. A flight to find a man who could no longer be found continued.

On the morning she was supposed to leave, Sedona woke before dawn. Denver was dark and silent. The mountains were only shadows now. She showered and dressed. She put on the black dress and called a car to the airport. She didn’t tell Kerstin.

At the terminal, people moved all around her with luggage, coffee, and places to be. A child cried near security. A man argued softly into his phone. A woman laughed while pulling a pink suitcase behind her. Sedona stood beneath the departure board and looked up:–

“Santa Barbara”

The flight still existed, only Matthew didn’t. She walked to the counter, then stopped. Her hands trembled around the handle of her suitcase. For two months, she had believed this airport would be the beginning of finding him. She had imagined fear, anger, maybe heartbreak. She hadn’t imagined this. She took out her phone and opened the ticket one last time.

Passenger: Sedona.

Destination: Santa Barbara.

She stared at it until the letters blurred. Then, she sat down by the window, where planes rolled across the runway beneath the gray morning sky. She didn’t board nor cancel. She simply sat there with the ticket in her hand, holding proof of the life where she had almost reached him in time.

When the plane finally lifted into the sky without her, Sedona watched it disappear west toward California, toward Kerstin, toward Santa Barbara, toward the ghost of the boy she had loved since high school. The ticket had been meant to bring her to Matthew. Instead, it became the last place she went looking for him.

Artwork provided by the author