Carrie

With tight shoulders and a broken heart, Carrie sat staring at her blank computer screen, willing the words to write themselves. Outside the merciless window before her, the sun didn't shine as bright as it had yesterday. But secretly, Carrie knew she couldn't blame the sun for its dimness.

Sunny or not, she'd still give her right hand to be out there.

Her coffee tasted too sweet, even while the bitterness beneath the sugar was poorly disguised. Earlier, Carrie had tried drinking it black, like so many of her heroes were keen to do. The result was a scalded tongue, a sense of rejection, and this lingering bitter quality lent to everything else that went into her mouth, including her words. She supposed she should be glad, then, that there was no one here to talk to.

Admittedly, she wasn't mortified when she looked in the mirror. In fact, occasionally she even felt pleased. Nonetheless, walking through the halls at her little closed-in school never failed to leave her self-conscious. And seeing people she knew together, always huddled in small groups, always left her feeling lonely. And the terrible self-pity didn't ebb at all when she realized that she herself either systematically avoided, or else narrowly escaped, each of those groups during their formation several weeks ago.

Something about independence? Off-timing? An impulse to check everyone out before immediately attaching herself to whoever accidentally sat closest to her, during those first, befuddled days of courses? Whatever her reasoning at the time, now any such precautions appeared cowardly, as well as unforgivably arrogant to her loner's eyes. She told herself she needed to learn how to cling, at least a little, to complete strangers if she had any hope of befriending them. That's how it worked, in times of (love and) war.

Returning her ADD-childish mind to the task at hand, she once again cleared her head of pathos and stared blankly at the screen. This time, she readied her fingers in the proper ASDF JKL; positions, just in case inspiration suddenly needed a place to chill. Still waiting, when she glanced up at the window she saw that it was raining.

Carrie

The sweet, empty sensations of "traveling" licked the insides of Carrie's thighs. Dissatisfied, but at least spent, she sleepily sucked on the moist tips of her fingers, pretending she tasted her far-gone lover there.

She moved through the days, dazed and sometimes manic with the magnificence of distraction, but most often as a distant witness to her own experiences. The shifting landscapes; the sensory overload of faces and sounds--unrecognizable to her in either expression or language; the summation of this absence of anything familiar, save her own occasional voice accompanied by startled look, returned by a glimpsed-at mirror...these were the things of her life just then. Profound, soul-bending, & ever more silent with every explanation.

As filled with newness as she always meant to be, still she fell asleep with an embodied lack of her love's memory: drifting off to the deserted rhythm of Beth's body breathing beneath her.

Carrie

There were things she didn't understand. Occasionally she labored under the impression that this was not so, but for the most part it went unsaid in her mind and known nonetheless.

Her most recent lapse from the loop of the universe came to her through the guise of her lover. Before that it took on the countenance of a stranger, once removed. And before that there were others, as there are always others.

"Why should I pretend I'm not arrogant? The very fact of it makes a denial damn near impossible. And whatever happened to finding arrogance appealing? I'm not the one changing here. Hey, don't even give me that look. This 'changing is a good thing' stance of yours is brand-fucking new and way too convenient to be taken seriously."

Her reflection looked contrite. But as this pleased her, in the next moment it began to look smug so that she felt ridiculous but pissed off anyway. She left the mirror alone with its victory.

Restless, Carrie asked her co-worker, "Do you consider yourself influenced by the weather?" as she returned from the restroom to the cubicle that they shared.

"Sure, my umbrella's right over there," she gestured wildly at the door before waving Carrie over to her with an impatient jerk-motion of her arm. She evidently didn't notice the younger woman's dissatisfied expression as she pressed on once again about the importance of consistent returns in their line of work, not bothering to explain what they were even doing here, so irrelevant as this small detail had turned out to be. In this room, Carrie found convincing herself that she was still alive to be hardest. Unfortunately, she also spent most of her time here.

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...

Carrie

[How the fuck do you express a tree?!] "Listen to the laughter!" I tell myself, but of course the thought drowns out both intention and sound. I think of you instead. Then I stop thinking altogether and compulsively eat raisins.

Just as a paranoid notion quivers before my mind--something about the likelihood of death by raisin engorgement--a blue pasty drink of some sort manifests itself before me in the guise of 'savior', and on the pretense of having been set there as though by a waiter. Obviously this could not be possible, given the fleeting wraith-like quality that is requisite for the elusive wait-creatures who only seem to share this 2pm diner with me as they forever flutter about, as though searching for a cigarette.

God, I need a cigarette. And when are you coming back? I wonder. So then I wonder if you wonder the same thing sometimes.

I can feel the raisins tug on my wandering attention and I glance at them guiltily, sitting there to the left of the damn chalk-violet drink which I have begun to suspect is the smoothie I ordered hours and hours ago. Finally, with what I hope to be a grandiose and symbol-ridden movement colored by glorious victory or some such awful thing, I pick up the fucking murderous container of former fruit and shove it into the black messenger bag at my feet. But then I watch a woman walk by dressed all in purple garb from crazy top hat to plastic shoes, and I have to take the poor raisins back out one last time, needing a little comfort in this godforsaken town/city.

When you left I cried for thirteen minutes and forty-seven seconds. A minute for every year since puberty; each minute signifying the countlessly counted few hairs skipped casually across the back of your knuckles. You're worth the mysteriously absent floor in every hundred-some level building in San Francisco, my love! My tears, then, almost match the hour, now--middle of the hellish afternoon--and I find myself wishing there was some meaning to this. Go figure...it turns out that I cannot imagine you without me. And I don't take this to be a good sign in the slightest.