It was Saturday night. I knew she was here. I was waiting on my friend and weed dealer outside one of the few local restaurants. We were from a small town so of course I knew this was where she worked. I knew she was here because I followed her on twitter. Weird how in such a connected age we’re supposed to pretend we aren’t all spying on each other.

She was dating some local punk with a bad haircut and a pill problem. I knew him, didn’t like him. She came out at 8. I was waiting.

“Hey, you. Whatchya doing here?” She asked like she didn’t know. We both knew what this was.

“Just happened to be here waiting on a friend. Forgot you said you worked here.”

“Uh huh. So he just happened to want to meet here? You didn’t suggest it?” She asked as if she was just figuring all this out.

“Call it a happy coincidence,” I said and smiled. I was about to leave. For now just the town, headed to the city to work for a few months before flying out of the state. I wasn’t leaving without her. I had decided this two days ago when she came to my apartment to catch up. Her name was Sarah and she was the closest thing I’d ever had to a girl friend. But she ended it when I dropped out of college.

“I don’t need an art degree to see where this is really going, Sam.”

“Then just say yes. You know you hate it here more than I do. This is what we always talked about. A way out. Just a couple months in the city and we’re out of here.”

She looked at her feet. I knew she longed for it. “Okay,” she said, “I’ll need a few days but my lease is up and I don’t want to stay here another goddamn year.” She smiled back at me.

Four days later we made love in our first apartment together.

That first month in the city was amazing. Downtown Chicago was perfect in the fall. We were broke as fuck but it felt like paradise. I busted my ass in a factory, moving boxes with a fork truck. She waited tables in a diner around the corner. For a couple months we were as blue collar as it got. We were still doing our real work on the side though. I wrote at night and sometimes for hours if I had a day off. She painted some of the most inspired shit I’ve ever seen on the walls of our bedroom. Two weeks later she’d white it out and start over. It was truly inspiring.

I was on my way back from work somewhere near the end of it all when I got two of the most life altering phone calls I’ll ever receive. The first came from my writing partner in New York. He’d flown out with a couple rough drafts to pitch while he set himself up with a place to live. He called to tell me that the studio liked our pitch and wanted to greenlight a pilot. The second was from Sarah, telling me that she was going back home. Her parents were both sick with various forms of cancer and she had to be there for them. She told me not to worry. She cried as I held her and told me that she’d follow me to New York one day. The thing I found more sad than being forced to leave her was how easy I found it to lie to her when I said I knew she would.