A Filter of Amber
Same Walk, Different Shoes
“Same Walk, Different Shoes” is a community writing project that Ben Wakeman organized as a practical exercise in empathy. The premise is simple. A group of writers anonymously contribute a personal story of an experience that changed their life. Each participating writer is randomly assigned one of these story prompts to turn into a short story. The story you are about to read is one from this collection. You can find all the stories from the participating writers at Catch & Release. Enjoy the walk with us.
Wow. The buzz of silence in the café tells me I’m not the only one not yet ready to leave the place of velvety possibility the poet has taken us. A single clap releases a flood, and I’m swept to my feet. I chuckle, recalling my earlier annoyance at the scrape of chairs and tables pulling me from my thesis notes and cueing me to chatter about a reading soon.
“Adaeza will sign books till seven,” Drip’s manager is saying.
She says something private to the poet, who throws her head back and lets loose a laugh that recruits her entire body. Her eyes, drawn by my stare, find mine. Thank you, I mouth, surprising myself with the boldness and intimacy (hopefully not creepiness) of the exchange. Her lips curve up, and she nods before turning to the crowd waiting to meet her.
My pocket buzzes, and as I join the back of the line, I fish my phone out and glance down. “Amber.” The café goes the way of the blood in my face.
“What are you doing right now?” the text reads. “Shintori’s?”
Wait. What? She’s in town? I’m shouldering my backpack, pressing earbuds in and dialing, and out the front door before the rest of my questions can roll out.
Her text silences the call. “Jumping in an Uber. Was headed to a hotel. But sushi calls!”
“Meet you in 20,” I text.
“It’ll be good to see an old friend.” I hear myself speak the words into the dusk and look around, realizing it was a weird thing to say. I have a brief thought of calling Tabby, but it’s 3 a.m. in Barcelona, and Carolina’s tolerance of my odd-hours calls to her wife has limits.
Shintori’s doesn’t look crowded. As I park, thinking how a year has past in seconds and an eternity, I’m hoping we can get the high top in the front window but see “our spot’s” taken. Then as I get closer, in a move I’ve seen a million times both awake and asleep, the woman at the window reaches up and pulls a tie from her hair. Strawberry curls spring from their containment, and I don’t need to be close to smell orange blossoms.
“Waylon!” She’s on her feet as I walk through the door.
“Good to see you, old friend,” I say. The phrase sounds even weirder than it had on the sidewalk.
“Well, what are you waiting for?” She pulls me into a citrus embrace.
She’s already put in our regular order and pulled the tall chairs together so we can both face the sidewalk. I climb up and join her on our perch.
“So.” She leans in, her knee grazing mine like it used to. “Tell me everything.”
How can a pair of eyes be forever playful and warm and deep? I’m sucked back in time—to the chem lab where it all started; the planning sessions over baked lobster; that night at Drip’s when I let opportunity, so close I could feel its wings like breath on my cheek, fly by. Then I’m in the front seat of a Honda Accord, staring at blue vinyl, and my face burns.
“Earth to Way,” she’s saying. The waiter arrives with our sake, and Amber says she’ll be right back. I turn and watch a gait I could pick out of a throng.
I couldn’t believe I was late for my first chem lab. I stepped quietly in, asking myself what kind of idiot takes chemistry as an elective just because he liked his high school chem teacher—when he was studying to teach, well, not science. (I hadn’t yet landed on “government/civics” for high schoolers.) Among the low murmur, I spotted the instructor up front bent in an unwelcoming pose. I was about to walk back out, when a pair of hazel eyes beneath a pile of marmalade hair and a backward nod lured me to one of the lab tables where huddled groups were working.
By the time the hour was up, I already knew Amber’s fingers were long, nails clean and short and that, when she read, she pulled out glasses with red frames that reminded her irises of the emerald in her hazel. She was smart but didn’t wear it like it made her something special and kind. And she carried, I don’t know, a secret that made being around her feel like a treasure hunt.
I caught myself before wishing out loud the lab wasn’t over. Or, rather, she stopped me with a move that took my breath away. She reached up to set curls that fell below her neckline free. And I was taken back to my only time in California. I was just a kid, and we'd visited a pick-your-own orange grove on vacation.
Outside the chem lab, I stupidly pointed in the opposite direction she’d indicated she was heading. But she lingered. And for the next three years, the campus, this city came to me through a filter of Amber.
“Now way, Way!” she squealed, with a wink, when I told her I was an education major. “Me too.”
I thought about one of Tabby's lyrics. What was it? “In the sound of her name / now and yesterday and always are the same.”
Amber was a year ahead of me in the program and quick to dish tips about teachers and schedules. I almost missed the “our” when she said, before we parted ways, “Hey, so a few of us are getting together at our place tonight. Potluck. You should come.”
Maybe my expression told her my eyes were the last two pins standing, and her “our” was rolling from the back of my mind straight at them. Or maybe she was just letting me know what was what before it was too late. She couldn’t have known that had long passed. “You're going to love George,” she said. “He plays bass too.”
I want to say Amber didn’t start living in my dreams that first night. But I did wake with a start from an orchard. I was at the top of a tall ladder. My parents below, laughter spilling from Mom as the two of them worked one of those extending fruit picker poles, didn’t notice. This one orange dangled like a gem, just out of reach of my little kid hand, soft and pink and callus free. I reached, my fingertips almost grazing warm, smooth skin. And then the ladder shifted.
“Oh, man. How cool would it be to hear your Primus on my Charley?”
Charley, for Charles Mingus, was the stand-up bass George played at regular gigs with his jazz band. Two years into an ethnomusicology degree, this guy was a deep studier and a listener. He’d just spent forty-five minutes deeply engaged as I carried on about how John “Thunderfingers” Entwistle had made the Who and how cool it was that a legend like Geezer learned his shit from Jack Burton and how it had been Les Claypool’s genius that had made me ask for my first bass. He’d even asked for a recording when I’d told him about how Tabby had taken our “band” to a new level when she’d written duets for her scream-lilted vocals and my bass lines.
I had wanted to hate George. But I could only hate him for making it impossible not to like him. I left the potluck with my name on the guest list for his show the coming weekend.
By the end of that first semester, Amber and I were coordinating our schedules and partnering on group projects whenever possible. When George graduated the next spring and took a yearlong fellowship in the Big Apple, the dreams took on a new intensity. I never told anyone this, not even Tabby. But there was a recurring dream where we had kids, Clementine and Alex. Who has dream children?!
I dated and promised myself not to think of Amber as anything but a friend (at least during my waking hours). Liz was the only one who things took on a hint of seriousness with. I still feel like an ass when I recall waking up with orange blossoms in my nose to Liz’s gorgeous blue gaze, her lavender scent never quite overpowering the citrus as she folded herself inside my arms.
“You should have started without me.” Amber’s voice cascades to the table. I look around to see, without my notice, the waiter has brought the bowl of edamame, the lobster roll dripping with eel sauce, and the spicy yellowtail with shrimp tempura. “Sorry that took a minute. I had to make a quick call.”
Something in her distracted demeanor reminds me of that night of missed opportunity. But instead of pressing, I pour sake from the tokkuri into our ochoko and raise mine. “How’ve you been, Amber Lynn?” I know she finds the use of her middle name endearing. Lynn was her dad’s mother, who lived with them after her mom left. Amber’s dad worried. So, she and Amber would sneak out like a couple of teenagers to watch the moon. The pair of them hand in hand, stifling giggles would sometimes slip past the gates of my dreamworld.
It seems like we’ve ravished the sushi in a second, and I’m about to suggest a stroll when Amber excuses herself from the table once more. As I signal for the check, I recognize a feeling of fullness that’s been absent much of this last year. Not in my belly but in all the fibers of my being, all of them saturated with Amber once more.
It occurs to me that, in her anecdotes over sushi about her junior high science students (who adore her, no surprise) and her dad’s declining memory, I notice one topic, one name missing. And in that void, I can see my future.
“Way, it was so good to see you.” Amber slides her credit card into the book next to mine as she returns but doesn’t sit back down. “George ended up getting on standby. So, I’m gonna head back to the hotel.”
I’m glad she’s not looking at my face. And I manage to sound normal when I offer, “Give you a ride?”
“Thanks,” she says. “I already have an Uber coming.”
In the silence of her departure, I sit in my Scion B3 and try to land. One thing flags the runway—the distraction she returned with both times she left the table. Except for those moments, she was her joyful self. Just like that night at Drip’s.
“Way, we have to get out of this library. I think I’m going to turn into one of those busts.”
I laughed, picturing a surprise of brightness and wild frozen curls among the scholarly old men marking the library’s aisles. We’d yet to nail a run-through of tomorrow’s presentation on pedagogical theory. So, I suggested Drip’s. The café was crowded, even for the end of a semester.
“Perfect.” Amber cruised to the corner table, where a trio was gathering empty mugs and books. She grabbed the coat rack against the wall and nodded for me to get the other end. Angling it, we created a barrier—a triangle cocoon.
Even after our cocoon’s walls had thinned to just a coat here, a jacket there, we remained ensconced. Amber looked out the window with a distraction that was rare. “What is it, Amber Lynn?” The tone, two years of desire compacted into five words, was so intimate it felt like a liberty too far, and I almost apologized.
But then her worries spilled out—that her and George’s passions would pull them ever farther apart. So softly I had to lean in, her breath on my cheek warm and earthy with tea, she said, “You can fall in love with more than one person? Find someone going in the same direction, right?” Even when her eyes lifted to search mine, I didn’t move the inch it would have taken to feel the softness of her lips against mine. Maybe it was the tear she flicked with the back of her finger that made me hesitate. Maybe I was seeing the way her eyes became multicolored stars when George walked into a room. Or maybe I was just a fool who lost my only chance to see if I could be the one to light those hazel flames.
Her phone on the table buzzed. We looked down and saw “Lover Boy George” pop up on the screen.
She and George lived in a bubble for the last few weeks before he took off for NYC, and she settled into completing her final year, never again mentioning concerns about their long-distance status. I think that was the catalyst for two things, Liz being the first. She was a women’s studies major, and she was brutally funny. I thought of her when I saw a flier for a stand-up show downtown. She didn’t give me any shit for taking weeks to ask her out after our coffee date, which had been her treat.
Walking back from the show, we stopped near a pond that separated campus from the rest of the city. I turned to her. Nose to nose, I wanted to run my fingers through her black hair.
I was so relieved to have someone to talk about when Amber talked about how George was thriving in the city and how she couldn’t wait to see him.
Liz was stirring something on the stove at her off-campus apartment when the Amber in my head started angling the Liz avatar out. I said something funny. I can’t remember what. Watching her back, it hit me I was watching for the shake of strawberry curls. I stood behind Liz, wrapping my arms around her and burying my face in her silky raven locks. But my guilt wasn’t any better than Liz’s beauty at keeping the Amber in my head at bay. We called it quits before Liz headed off to law school.
I start the car and try not to think about the second reactant and how it had led to Amber lit by dome lights, dripping with compassion.
“I'm really glad you told me, Way. I mean it. I’m beyond flattered. And I honestly don’t know, you know, if George and I weren’t—”
“I know.” I didn’t want her to talk about him. “I just couldn’t not say it, at least once.”
We’d been in the library again, this time each working on our own thing. She had one more final, and she’d be done, gone. Stretching my legs, I’d stopped by a bust of Thomas Edison. The thought of my last year without a head full of marmalade curls beneath yolky library luminescence made me wild and bold. “I’ve been crazy about you since day one.” I hadn’t even sat back down before it came out.
I didn’t remember descending the stairs to the privacy of her car. But I was glad we were there when it all spilled out. The orange grove, the Amber avatar. I might have mentioned fate. We talked about paths and forking opportunities and how our friendship had made the last three years better for both of us. But walking back in the moonlight four hours later, I mostly knew she had chosen George.
I can't help but feel the same now as I did then.
Except. Hadn’t her distraction mirrored that in our Drip’s cocoon? Hadn’t she texted me as soon as she got to town without George? What if she’d broken up with him? What if his unexpected arrival was a play to hold on to her?
I don’t want to hurt George. But this is forever. This is Clementine and Alex. I fall asleep formulating my plan. I’ll call her first thing in the morning.
“How’d you sleep? How’s George?”
A pause. “He … got his own room.”
I’m proud of the way I keep even a hint of victory from my tone as I ask if she wants me to pick her up.
“I do,” she says, with a fervor that makes me weak.
It all comes out over breakfast sandwiches and lattes. George is moving to Europe, and she’s ready to be with someone going in the same direction. “I know exactly what I want now.” The flirtatious glint in her eyes I was once jealous of falls on me. She asks me to take her shopping. I can't believe how quickly everything is falling into place like I’ve always dreamed. Even the store with the gown that makes her gasp hanging in the window seems to have just appeared in front of us.
“I know you’re not supposed to see it ahead of time,” she teases. “But we’re not tradition people, right?”
I catch my reflection in the rearview mirror as I’m parking and nearly hit the car behind me when I see George's face where mine should be. But I shake it away. Don’t be one of those guys who won't just let the good thing happen.
In the store, I sit, and an attendant brings champagne.
“You ready?” Amber calls from the dressing room.
I am. Still, my breath shortens when she steps out. Her bare shoulders glow against cream satin. I’m about to suggest an orange grove for the ceremony when she says, “It’s kind of like the dress George’s mom wore. I think he’ll like that, a nod to her memory.”
It hits me. I misunderstood. The champagne glass slips. But before it shatters, I’m in my bed. No attendant, no gown, no girl in white—my friend from college, trying on the dress she’ll wear to marry the man she’s loved since before I met her.
Damn, man. I feel more than a little ridiculous.
Two weeks later, I stop at the mailbox on my way to Drip’s and find a buttercream-colored envelope. At the counter, a stack of books from the reading the night of Amber’s return remains. I buy one with my coffee.
I sit at the table and open the envelope. “Save the date,” it reads over a photo of Amber and George looking deeply into each other’s eyes. I feel genuinely happy for my two college friends. And I feel gloriously empty—free of what was never mine to fill myself with and clear, unfiltered openness to possibility.
Thank you to and the other writers who participated in this collaborative project, especially the writer who provided the anonymous prompt that gave rise to Waylon and Amber and the other characters from this piece. The divergence from my norm into the world of fiction was more fun than I could have known it would be. I hope it was fun for you too. Check out the other stories in this collection! I’ve been exploring the work of the other writers this month, and let’s just say, I’m sure you’ll be in for a treat. (If you know me personally, you might find among them the story that was born of my prompt. We’re keeping it anonymous, so if you do and want to note that, let me know offline.)
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Ow. My heart hurts. These kinds of relationships are so so gorgeous and yet SO SO painful. Why do we do it???? Of course, I know why.
You nailed the emotion of this Holly. Beautifully done.
Loved this line: "she pulled out glasses with red frames that reminded her irises of the emerald in her hazel." Among many others. 💜💜💜
All the unsaid, the wonderful gaps...this really makes your story pop. Just wonderful.