Since You Left Me by Allen Zadoff

tenses like she’s about to get into it with me, then, just as quickly, she lets the anger drain from her. She makes one of those motions like she’s pulling aninvisible string from her chest. She takes a deep breath, and her voice softens.
    “It’s strange to have a new person here. I understand.”
    “You don’t understand,” I say.
    The guru and I are still standing, looking at each other.
    “Can we just have breakfast like civilized people?” Mom says.
    “Since when are we civilized?” I say.
    I look to Sweet Caroline for support. I don’t get any.
    “Please have breakfast with us,” Mom says. “I got you some organic breakfast bars. I know you like those.”
    I look at the guru, all wrapped up in flowing orange robes. The man who believes in nothing, yet has followers wherever he goes.
    He’s not going to add me to his list.
    “I changed my mind,” I say. “I’m not hungry.”
    I grab my backpack and storm out of the house.

“They will find us.”
    That’s what the guru said earlier. The people who want what he has will find him. Is that what happened with Mom? She was looking for something, anything, and this is what she found?
    The thought makes me sick inside. The idea that my mother is one of those people who jumps at any trend, believing she’s found the answer to life’s questions.
    That gets me thinking about Herschel.
    He’s at shul right now, sitting with everyone and praying. I consider going there to join him. I remember what that used to be like, the sound of voices in unison, calling out to God. The feeling of sitting in a group of believers. We would go as a family sometimes, drive to Zadie’s house, park the car, then walk from his place because he wouldn’t use the car on Shabbat. We’d show up at Zadie’s synagogue and everyone would greet him, pinch my cheeks, say how happy they were to see us and make space forus to sit down. Sometimes I’d even feel happy to be there.
    I could go to shul with Herschel now, but it wouldn’t be the same. I’d just be taking up space because I don’t believe.
    So I walk.
    It’s a warm Saturday in April, and I walk down San Vicente west towards Santa Monica. The exercisers are out en masse. There are runners, bikers, speed walkers, uniformed teams of cyclists. It seems like when you turn forty in Brentwood you have to join a cycling team, put on one of those skin-tight colored uniforms, and wear funny shoes that click when you walk into the coffee shop.
    I move in the same direction as the exercisers, west, towards the ocean. I read somewhere that there is a high rate of suicide in California because people who are trying to escape their lives head west, and when they get here and find that nothing has changed, that they’ve run out of choices, they jump into the ocean or drive off Pacific Coast Highway.
    It’s an interesting theory, but what happens if your life starts here?
    Where do you go?
    “On your right!” a cyclist shouts, and goes flying by me, so close that I feel the wind blow the hairs on my arm.
    “Watch it!” another one says.
    I’ve wandered too close to the bike lane, and a riding team is shouting at me, territorial, ready to mow me down.
    I jump to get out of one’s way, and I end up in front of another. I dodge that one and the next one comes. One cyclist after another shouts rude things at me. It’s like a hyena attack on one of those nature shows where they surround some defenseless animal and hound it until it collapses.
    I’m that animal.
    It seems to go on forever, the shouts and the wind and the rushing bikes. Finally, I can’t take it anymore. I gather my courage, let out a roar, and spin around to face the pack.
    But they’re gone.
    There are no bikes. They’ve all passed me by.
    I’m alone on the median on San Vicente, ready to fight something that’s not there.

“You’re off balance, Sanskrit.”
    That’s what Mom says when I walk back into the house an hour later.
    “I’m not off