Again (Fiction)

I saw her again… but I don’t know if I’d say I saw her again because it’d been so long since I last saw her. This time almost felt like the first time, not the first time, just the first time. I guess somewhere between my regrets at not having asked her out properly and that time I hit my head really hard, but not hard enough to know for sure if I had a concussion- or yesterday for short- I’d forgotten about her. Seeing her sparked some feelings; some, enough to start a fire but not one that would burn too bright.
     I stood there in the middle of the sidewalk, the lunch crowd flowing around me as I tried to figure out what feelings were sparked. Was it a combination of lust and hope for a second chance, like a drunkard of an ex-husband coming out of a reverie of isolation due to a run-in with the former misses? Or was it shame mixed with a sense of wisdom at having realized that the very fact I can feel any shame about my interactions with her makes me human, like the opposable thumb or man’s tendency to destroy his environment which stems from a never-ending desire to expand personal wealth, a result of an insecurity we’re all born with and try to compensate for rather than understand and deal with even though it might take no longer than those chance encounters that we have with people who we’re sure are our soul mates but, once we turn around, they’re gone, like those fathers who stepped out for cigarettes but left their lighter at home to collect dust and the occasional teardrop filled with the kind of hope only a child can possess.

     Or maybe what I felt was hunger?

     After all, it had been over four hours since my last meal, instead of the usual three because George Ormillio – a tall, Napolean-looking man who smelled faintly of Drakkar Noir and a subtle layer of broken dreams fused with a complementary tone of addiction that spirals out of control and affects those around the addictee just as much – decided that today’s weekly meeting to provide updates on the Sansato project would be a good time to speak up on what he felt were flawed observations on Sansato’s data needs and how they rendered our current solution and project pointless. This then caused an argument between the project staff, the kind of argument that caused everyone to scrap their lunch plans so they could eat in their office and ponder over whether their sweat at the meeting came from the unexpected heat we were experiencing this early in March, or the sheer effort required to muster the passion to think critically about the argument they were having, a passion which they surely must have reached into the depths of their being for – alongside their young ideas and ideals which stemmed from barely grasping the world around them in fear of finding only more questions to be answered – pulled out, saw that it was from a dream long forgotten and never pursued, yet still used it to contribute in a way that made them sound professional in front of people they could care less about but for whose approval they would die for. But not me. This was where I always wanted to be in life, not a temporary step on the way to a position that will not only solve everything and ensure permanence in social circles that have long ago spun out of any reasonable orbit, but will also stand immortal to the law of diminishing returns. So I went out for lunch, like always.

     Which brings me to now. I saw her enter an Indian restaurant two minutes ago, which was odd, because years ago, when we were young and she had dreams of making the kind of music galaxies danced to, I heard her tell her friend she hated spicy food as she proceeded to do what turned out to be a cartwheel but, what to me at least, looked as if she had lost her balance and thus I screamed out “NO!”, but due to my self-absorption and nervousness, that scream came out only as a whisper as faint as morning mist about an hour after sunrise. 

     So she changed. Her feelings toward spicy food went the way of women’s right to vote in the early 1900’s, maybe her feelings toward me also went along.

     But what were they? Did she have any feelings about me? Or was I just one of those creepy guys to her, one who you keep making eye contact with on the subway and even though you want to look away, you can’t because that glitter of light in their eyes is most likely a by-product of the bright future they’re planning to spend with you, and let’s face it, who even thinks about your future anyways? Or maybe I was her “what-if”, someone she thinks about when a lifetime of loneliness creeps up behind her and grasps her throat with the familiarity and intimacy that many a men and women have wasted their life away in search of. Maybe when that threat becomes real, as real as any tap on the shoulder when you’re lost in thought, she thinks back and sees the real significance of her turning me down, that I was someone that yearned for her, someone that wanted her, someone that heard her name in the faint conversations that the wind tends to have on cloudy days. And quite possibly, she thinks about what life would be like if we were together. Or maybe she forgot about me? Maybe my face blended into the sea of faces that one inevitably glances at in any given lifetime and formed a collage, a collage that you skip over and barely pay attention to as you look for your child’s particular collage on the wall beside their classroom, which you’ll also forget the specifics of but not the feeling of dread you got over the possibility that your child might suffer from an undiscovered illness that causes them to only do things that disappoint you, and worse, the shame that this illness might be genetic.

     I stood there on the street as all around me, people walked and talked in conversations they were so selfishly absorbed in that they wouldn’t have noticed if the other person dropped dead until they got home, laid in bed, and went over the conversation to look for new things to add in and bits to take out should they ever find another opportunity to express the same thing, the same, albeit polished, thought, over and over again.

     I stood there as a homeless man went onto the street where a bus slowed down just quick enough to avoid hitting him. I stood there as he lifted the disfigured cigar to his mouth so he could allow that hand to give the bus the finger. I stood there as my instinct to laugh took a turn and became a desire to reach out and hug the man because this near death experience was probably the closest he felt to being alive.

     But I had a decision to make. Should I go into the restaurant or should I continue down the street, forever reclined to think about what could have been, like a philosophy major cleaning ketchup, mustard, and special sauce out of his hair because he happened to take his hat off just as an outraged customer threw his sub-satisfactory burger so perfectly that a part-time priest who was working a shift on cash cried out, “ Well if that isn’t an act of god, then what is?”

     I took one last look around the street with the air of a man about to take his final breath, and decided to go in to the restaurant and try my luck, because who knew when I’d see her, again.