White-Winged Doves
Feb 2, 2026
In the summer, my husband and I had reached a milestone: ten full years in a relationship, aluminum trophies to us both. That this had happened came much as a surprise, but upon counting the months between, it appeared that, somehow, this was correct, and not, to my initial response, a fabrication. It became increasingly difficult over the years to listen to my friends’ relationship woes. The further I grew from singledom, the harder it became to relate. After all, relationship advice always came easily to me when I had my own anecdotes to rely upon.
Around that time, before the heat of summer set into Los Angeles and the nights remained cool, I found myself arriving three hours early to a preview screening of an upcoming anticipated film. I could justify this by acknowledging the theater lived fifteen minutes from my office, and I read the entirety of Tezer Özlü’s Cold Nights of Childhood, an autobiographical novel about her relationships with men between trips to psychiatric wards in the mid-20th century throughout Europe.
Behind me in line approached a young woman, a few years younger than me, perhaps mid or late-20s. Like me, she stood alone, and like me she appeared to be waiting for someone, choosing to scroll her personal device instead of reading.
Shortly after this, two women in their fifties joined the line. Along the length of the sidewalk beside this westside theater, there exists a low wall of brick perfect for sitting as you waited. When I entered the queue, already tenth in line, I reached the intersection, where the short wall turned in an L-shape, a support beam to the awning above at the area the brick wall made a right angle with itself. I sat beside this corner, leaving a few feet to my right, which became occupied by the young woman and the older women. They occupied the remainder of this opportune seating arrangement; any future members of the line would be forced to stand, or risk sitting on the barren sidewalk.
“Thank God we can sit,” the closer of the pair said, taking her spot and massaging her knee. “It would be Hell to stand these next two hours.” The young girl moved a few inches closer to me. The older woman carefully removed a sandwich from her purse, and proceeded to unwrap it noisily from paper. A few sandwich entrails fell onto the sidewalk in front of her: a corner of the bread, a cucumber, a shred of lettuce. It was somewhere between five and six then, and I anticipated my husband’s arrival with my own sandwich to consume, feeling, suddenly in the presence of food, a stirring hunger that had not previously been known to me.
A young man wearing a trucker hat and denim jacket greeted the young woman next to me, and asked her what she wanted to eat. They went back and forth, arguing options in the area (there are few both quick and cheap, assuming they lived budgeted lives), then settled on one, presumably the same sandwich place as the older women; surely they, too, felt the stirrings of hunger the wet sandwiches in paper had instilled in me. He left to hunt their meal. Once he was across the street and out of earshot, the nearer of the pair acknowledged the couple.
“He’s very handsome,” she said suddenly. “You make a very handsome couple.”
“We’re not together,” the younger woman said.
“Why not?” the elder responded. “You’re young and beautiful. Why shouldn’t you be together? Look at how he smiles! She doesn’t notice how his eyes sparkle when she speaks, takes it for granted that a young man will buy her dinner, carry it back for her.”
“We tried it once,” the younger said, opening her petals to the older woman’s faint touch. “It didn’t work out. We weren’t exactly compatible.”
This piqued my interest, and I knew I had to listen into the rest of the conversation. I would hold the book in my hand, glance over the prose, mix in my mind the tales of the young woman in Turkey with the one beside me. After all, aren’t stories of people you know more interesting?
“Why, what did he do?”
“Well, we’re just friends now. We were in college together, that’s where we met. A lot of our friends moved to Los Angeles after graduating. We moved into the same building here, but all of it, the moving, the finding a job, the paying for rent and groceries and cooking. It became a lot to handle, and there was a mutual decision that we’d ought to work on ourselves first before deciding to try to build a life together. We both work in the industry. Or, we’re both trying to work in the industry. The pandemic, the strikes, the fires. There’s not a lot of opportunity right now. It makes the economic situation of our lives harder to navigate.”
“It’s harder alone! Why are you separating yourselves? Why are you putting up walls? Don’t you know it’s easier with someone to rely on?”
“We’re friends. We still rely on each other.”
When my husband and I moved to Los Angeles, in a whirlwind two-and-a-half day drive across I-10 from south Florida to Van Nuys, myself still sick with the flu from the plane ride from Paris, us never having lived in the same place together, driving each morning into a sunrise that whispered of beginnings, did not have fear, or, rather, only a latent fear, an unacknowledged fear, that things may not be sunrise, that, really, it echoed its inverse, but upon moving into our first apartment, sharing two twin beds pushed together on the floor, taking L.A. city buses to Westwood, reading speculative screenplays in producers’ backyard offices, counting the pennies in the bank account, it became true to me through experience that the older woman was correct, and doing something together was much easier than doing it apart.
It felt, either then or in retrospect—a previously-experienced retrospect, like a remembered epiphany I stumbled upon again on this low brick wall—that what we had experienced was the equivalent to what was said about the formation of the universe: either everything exploded at once out of nothing, and time was created, or it was fashioned over the course of six active days and one of rest by some in this case benevolent being.
Or so that was how I fashioned the story of my life.
A man carrying a manila envelope rounded the corner, and showed me a few of his drawings. My back was to the front of the queue; I faced away from the theater, to the intersection and the streets beyond it. Going east: the main thoroughfare with shops, restaurants, and a grocery store. Going south: several multi-million dollar houses, hedges and trees grown to add a layer of privacy to front yards. I did not see the man approaching, otherwise I would’ve been better at shrugging him off. Since he took me off guard, I was unprepared to say no, to move him along the line, and so he got a lot of mileage out of his portfolio.
Drawings of Nairobi women, cacti in the desert heat, recreations of pottery. Then, he turned the page, and a beautiful rendition of a black bird of prey drew my attention.
“Hawk?” I asked.
The man shook his head. “California Condor,” he said. Then, pointing to the tattoo on my inner left bicep, “Hawk?”
“Falcon,” I said. Then gesturing to myself, “Falconer.”
I meant it metaphorically, but he didn’t need to know that. I pulled out my personal device, sent him twenty dollars, and held the print of the California Condor. Once he called it out, I clued into the balded head, the pitch black of the wings. They’re a remarkable species—the largest of the birds in North America. They form long-term romantic bonds, and are known for the length of time needed to care for their offspring, one of the key reasons the species has been threatened with extinction. Though how beautiful: this bird of death, courtship rituals and relationships lasting sixty years—raising their chicks, together, for a full year, one at a time. It was that dichotomy, the bridge between romance and death, that made me purchase the print.
The women beside me continued their conversation so as to avoid the down-on-his-luck artist shelling prints out of a manila envelope. Though, pleased with a sale, he was not burnt by their lack of interest.
“I think you should try again. My husband and I—he’s in Paris. We live in Paris and L.A., he’s there now. That’s where we met, in a bar. We were the only two dancing and found it auspicious. I didn’t meet him until I was in my 40s, and he his 50s. That was how the timing worked out for us. But we didn’t get married first. We broke up, on account of the distance, but we both knew in our guts that we had to try again. You should ask your gut.”
“My gut’s pretty hungry,” the younger woman said. “I wonder what’s taking him so long. There must be a line. How long have you and your husband been together? He was a fool to let you go, and a wise man to propose to you. I hope I’m as beautiful as you when I’m your age—I hope you don’t take that the wrong way.”
“No reason to apologize—thank you. When we met, my husband told me that he had already met the love of his life. When he was in his twenties, he went to a wedding of a friend from college. There in the crowd was a woman, and her beauty drew him to her. They danced together the whole night, and they had so many things in common. The same interests, similar families. They shared a common worldview that, I’ll be honest, is not so common to anybody else. He told me, that night we met, that this was the first time he had felt truly understood by another person. And that feeling, to him, was love—the essence of love, what it meant to be loved and to love in return. At the end of the night, after the bride and groom had long since retreated to the bridal suite, they said their goodbyes. Unfortunately for my husband, the love of his life was in her eighties. She died a few years later, and he was at the funeral with his college friend, leaving her white roses for the life they never had.”
“And he told you that when you first met?”
“It was a warning to me. That I could never live up to this woman that he met, understood, loved, and had taken from him. That’s the tragedy of life, isn’t it? That there are so many people, and only a few can care to get to know you. It’s painful, really, to be surrounded in a city and misunderstood. To my benefit, my husband had two loves of his life. And we understood each other. We’re both people of independence. Two cities. Two cultures. Two people: one marriage. It’s perfect to us. I’m flying to Paris next week to see him, it’s our tenth wedding anniversary.”
Just then, two white-winged doves flew and landed at the feet of the older woman. They pecked at the crumbs, the corner of crust, the scattered lettuce. They ate what remained of her sandwich, then flew off into the night. They had come from nowhere; or, since I was watching out of the corner of my eye, I saw them ascend behind the grown hedge fence of one of the mansions south of the theater. Their wings fluttered, and their graceful bodies descended to their meal.
“Where did they come from?” the young woman said.
“That, my dear, is a sign from God.”
“Your husband—he loves you, though, doesn’t he? You don’t feel the ghost of the woman he met when he was young?”
“She’s there; and I’m there, too. Life’s not so long, really, to get caught up in the details.”
Then, from the yard where the doves appeared, a young boy stepped onto the sidewalk. He had a toy drum strung around his neck, and a stick in either hand. He wore a tuxedo, and beat the drum in a steady rhythm. Bum. Bum. Bum. Bum.
Behind him followed a woman in a white dress of lace, a veil covering her head, and a man in a black suit like a penguin, walking in step with the rhythm of the drum. The young boy led them up the street. Behind the couple, there followed rows of people. Old men in tweed suits. Women in floor-length gowns, sleeves covering their arms. All together this group marched, in step with the young boy with the toy drum. It was funereal, somber. No cross-talk or laughter. No jubilation. Just the incessant beating of the toy drum, and the sound of loafers against a dusty sidewalk. It was unclear whether they were coming from a wedding ceremony, or heading towards one.
“How beautiful,” the older woman said. “I love a wedding.”
The young man returned, cradling two sandwiches in his arms. He handed one to the young woman, who thanked him. He pulled a glass bottle of kombucha out of his pocket, and she expressed gratitude that he remembered her favorite. The old woman elbowed her and said something about the inexplicable nature of God. The beauty of a holy matrimony.
I admired the California Condor and returned to my book. The appearance of two other sandwiches awakened in me a renewed hunger. My stomach growled, and I hoped that the noise of the street covered it. I’d rather be known for my witty observations than the insolence of my intestinal track. I tried not to think about it, knowing that my husband was parking the car, surely, and would arrive in moments with my own meal. Any grumblings were but a reminder of the satisfaction of satiety.