Alone

Adrienne cried quiet tears into her black coffee as she waited for the bank upstairs to confirm the wire transfer from her father. After she had some money, she would go about doing the things that had to be done; check into her hotel, cancel her credit cards, contact the consulate and see about getting a new passport. She sat at the narrow, island bar surrounded with round bar stools as she looked out over the silk flowers at the double decker buses stopping abruptly, then just as abruptly rushing away. The silk flowers that filled the island were a deep purple and brilliant yellow; they reminded her of the wild flowers of a Texas spring that she had left to come here. She started to question herself. What was she doing here? How long would she be stuck in Hong Kong? Soon, she was questioning everything that had happened in the past two weeks.

Everything had happened so quickly. Brent had left her for a younger girl that worked in his office just after she had lost her job. The girl was a stranger to her but a former classmate of her younger sister, pretty from what she heard. Her roommate was moving out, leaving her with a rent she could no longer pay. Her best friend had just finished an English teaching job and asked her to meet her in Asia. An adventure, at the time, seemed to be exactly what she needed. Brent had warned her that she didn't know what she was getting into, but it was that kind of overbearing protectiveness, even after they'd broken up, that Adrienne had always hated. Now, it seemed that he was right. She was in the country exactly 37 minutes before her bag was stolen from the complimentary luggage push cart that she used to wheel her luggage into the main terminal. From that moment, she'd been relying on the kindness of strangers; the bus ride to the city, the phone call to her father, even this cup of coffee was compliments of the bank teller who saw that Adrienne felt alone in one of the most crowded cities in the world and just wasn't going to make it without a little help.