Carrie

"No more of this! Be here!" I think, forcefully demanding my thoughts to stay put, behave, and be content for a moment. "Focus for a second! Focus on the parallelogram that the shadowed window makes. Look around, goddamnit!" The open-air room of the cafe spills out into the day as though desperately seeking the cloud-hidden sun. Lovely, youthful people fill up the tables that pepper the space surrounding me, and they seem to laugh continuously like staggered breathing, beaming like children and with the happy extravagance that only the miserable eyes of self-pity could ever bear witness to. Realizing this bias of my pointed sight, I try to focus on the table furthest from me while keeping my own arbitrary circumstances at bay. Valiantly, I fix my gaze and graceful imaginings, and pretend myself capable of the singular translation hiding and embodied by this particular light-lacquered table across the room, its bar stools sporting three engrossedly bored individuals.

An outsider, I want to know what they are filling their conversation up with, what words they have deemed worthy of this clueless & sunny-sunny day. Being out of earshot, I study the appearance of the persons away yonder there to tune into mannerisms, gesticulations and expressions, feigning recognition of the most intimate and minute of signaling details that they send solely to me, their ever willing and appreciative audience.

They sit half-moon style, semi-encircling the square table. From my view, two faces showed in profile (one male, one female) and the lovely round face of a woman sparkled between these, facing me straight on. I decided that her name must be Lydia. Lydia's companions ruled the conversation as they waved their hands harmoniously and in rhyme, while Lydia herself sat quite still, grinning marvelously, beatific, and slowly pivoted her glance from one animated monologue to the next, probably not listening. Or at the very least, dear Lydia was virtually unable to bridge a connection between the segregated, self-perpetuating discussions.

The man spoke of flowers, I knew, and of their wild variety; his passionate, muted voice gave the impression of brightly orange-lit scents. In contrast, I felt that the woman must sound agitated. Her chosen subject matter, cream coffee, seemed not to warrant quite the same level of admiration from our lovely and traitorous Lydia, whose lingering gaze upon the man still cared nothing for wildflowers, as everyone knew.

Watching the three half-participants paying homage to the art of speech, I was well aware that I ruthlessly lied to myself on this matter of topic: all people ever talk about is other people. I hardly believed that out Lydia could be the exception to this disease of conceit that we all seem to have. Her beauty would make the ailment ever more fatal, I thought morbidly, at last rising from my table for to escape the viciously pleasant scene. The cash I tossed onto its surface made me think of cheap, dewy-eyed Venetian whores from the year 1495, collecting alms from poor and lonely letches.

I remained ruminating upon the circularity of days when a friend of mine interrupted me from my reverie-walk away from the cafe.

I couldn't remember his name. It dawned on me that we weren't friends at all when I recognized him now as the bearded barista who worked the taps of my favorite pretentious cafe-bar down in the town that was yours and mine. This lovely twentysomething guy had far too often concocted magical mixtures for me, bearing life-thumping caffeine. The sudden shock of a familiar face within the strangeness of unexpected surroundings had had me momentarily baffled. But the trick of a cheap mystery revealed, I remembered that I'd never known the handsome fellow's name at all (fellow creatures of habit, though we were)--despite the silly bit of an infatuation that would rise within me when we were separated by a lone counter, and my acute awareness of his proximity made it hard to get on with my neutral order of a tame latte.

The point of all this: my nameless coffee-server-potential-lover appeared before me in a bizarre twist of my sense of normalcy. Recognizing each other over a thousand miles from the only other context in which we'd had a simultaneous, if bit, part, meant that we stopped and laughed incredulously together as if it was the only natural thing to do, given the circumstances and among well-placed foreign strangers. I realized then that I'd never watched this mysterious man laugh in all of my existence, and strangely, the sight wasn't as attractive as I'd convinced myself that it would be. Heh. His eyes squeezed shut when he laughed, such that only folks that loved him would claim it was in a cute way.

"This is so CRAZY!" Man was saying to me now. What are you doing all the way over here? Sorry I can't offer to make you a coffee or anything!" He joked lamely.

"Hey, you can always offer to buy me one before we change subject," I said to him, flirting completely by accident and wishing I could take it back or stop (talking) soon. I pushed on quickly instead, before he could respond with anything but a stunted explosion of a snort-cackle crazy thing/sound. "I'm here for school. I leave in a week after bumming around out here for 16 days. What are you up to? Learning the ancient art of an Italian brew, are ya?"

"Haha!" (Laughing way too much of course--like the coupla amazing manics we were.) "Not exactly," 'twas his initial reply. "I'm actually about to begin taking classes here as well...over at the biggest University I've ever seen in my whole life." He finished with faux-poetic/notable flair and a sideways grin like a mouth-wink.

Before I could get around to thinking up something clever he shot out spurt-like, "Hey!" I don't even know your name! I've always just thought of you as 'Latte-Chick' in my head, ha!" Cute. And I've always just thought of him as 'Take me! Take me NOW!' Or sometimes 'Bob'. He looked like he could be someone's cranky uncle--especially on those early mornings when my need for a shot of espresso was at its wildest...