Intelligent Conversation

The girl who wore Mary Janes and the guy who hated girls who wore Mary Janes sat at tables across from each other at the Blue Note Cafe. Molly, the girl played with her coffee stirrer, drowning pieces of melting sugar into the lightly colored mixture of vanilla and cream. The guy, who shortened his name to Will because his parents were obsessed with Charlotte's Web and named him after Wilbur, the pig, scribbled in a drawing pad. The ink from his pen dripping onto the clean edged paper. He lifted his hand, ink smearing, feeding into his lifeline. Slow and steady, like his pulse dulled by the mediocrity of life.

Neither one spoke to anyone. They were two souls in search of ambience. She dreamed of intimacy, red Christmas lights strung up, wall's pregnant with shadowy, lusting light. Meanwhile, he sought privacy in a world where opposites attract, and chemistry was the combination of scents and images perfectly amalgamated to propagate the species. He longed for intercourse, but only in the conversational text, women with legs were plentiful, women with minds were antiques. And he considered himself an antique dealer of sorts.

Although they did not speak, they were not silent. Molly hummed "Seasons of Love" from Rent as Will laughed to himself, wiping the condensation from hie glass of ice tea, no lemon, using the dampened napkin to clean his fingers and palm. The ink transferred to the thin tissue, lining it like a body of water, seeping slowly into the porous flowers printed into the fabric. The flowers bloomed in black and white.

There they sat, neglected singles, taking up leg room meant for pairs. Both in need of substance, thirsting for knowledge, mouths filled with dust, continuously collecting more with every word left unsaid. And it would be so easy to tamper with fate. One shared moment, one smile, one gesture, a soft hello, or a quick nod of the head and destiny would be diverted. And these strangers, who will go home to their dark apartments and who will chat about their day to their fork and spoon as they devour their loveless meals, listening to their own voices and finding comfort in the echoes, could have found function in totaling one plus one. It would have taken a minute, sixty seconds in the fabric of time, for this wrinkled duo to iron out their dissimilarities and become a proud parents of a silly little thing called love.

But an end is always someone else's beginning and so with their time up, fate sailed its ship. It drifted slowly as first, unsure of itself but grew steadier with time. Soon it faded altogether like a distant star, vanishing with a sigh.

Molly stood, leaving the table where she folded and unfolded her unused napkin. Where she drank her coffee while humming, and where she debated her life, or rather the worth of her life. Weighed down by the change in her pocket she paused at Will's table, looking as though she was about to comment on his ink stain, Rorschach blot. Instead, she turned suddenly, her hips almost violent as she proceeded out the door and into the gray sky disappearing perhaps from the Earth as single people often do.

Will leaving his sty, stood and stretched. He grabbed his coat from the back of his chair and slipped it on slowly as though he expected the doors to open and the girl with the Mary Janes, who he had not noticed until struck by her wooden, rotating hips made her grand reentrance. Realizing she would not return this day, he departed, also disappearing into the now grayer sky. His flowers lay wilting on the table, forgotten.

It never occurred to anyone, that while she thought about what might have been, he considered what it was.