Thursday

He walked in hastily clinging on to a really long black coat as if his life depended on it after minutes of peering through the window, as if checking to see the place was open yet. It came to no surprise as Michelle’s diner was open even in the harshest of winters we had experienced in the past. He shook himself slightly as he closed the door as an attempt to shake off the small pieces of snow that covered the top half of his worn out coat. I watched him walk with his head down as if he was trying to shield his face from the cold. I had never seen him before and I was a devoted regular here. I continued to look at him while occasionally focusing on something else fearing that he would notice two eyes staring intently at him and freak out. There was a great deal of people chatting away and enjoying each other’s company while the jukebox played ‘piano man’ for the fourth time. I don’t think anyone else took notice of him.

Call me melodramatic but his demeanor and the way he looked was quite a contradiction to where he was. He seemed quite out of place and it seemed like he knew he was too. I watched him walk slowly to the counter with much less pace than what he had entered with. The server at the till flashed a smile with that pink lipstick and those pearly whites at him and I saw him ease up as if he felt a little more welcomed in this place. He ordered something and started to shake a bit from the cold. He looked sideways as he waited to get his order and for a split second he caught me looking and I stared into space, my eyes moving slowing to make it seem like I was not avoiding his gaze.

A few minutes later he got his order, walked away from the counter and scanned around to see if there was a table he could sit at and he unfortunately came to the realization that there was none. I looked at him again and he looked at me, only this time I didn’t look away, I made it known that my eyes were fixated on him. I guess he took that as an invitation to come closer. I pretended to jot something down in my notebook as I adjusted my glasses.

“Hi,” That was the first word he ever said to me. My body tensed up a bit and I had to take a few seconds to gather myself before I looked up.

“Hello,” I said as I tried to muster up the most cheerful hello possible. I smiled at him.

He looked at me for a while, brows furrowed and I realized that he had said something while I was busy getting way too into my head.

“You can sit there, the seat isn’t taken” I said abruptly

“Thanks,” he said lowly,second guessing if it was really worth it sitting on a table with a woman who was apparently acting bonkers.

We sat in silence for a while and it allowed me to steal a few glances at him. He was gorgeous, in the most unexplainable way. He had mid length hair that lay loosely on his face and it was apparent that he took no notice in that it needed a trim. He had gray eyes, really light eyes like the snow that he had been trying to shake off earlier. He had really thick eyebrows that served as a contrast to his eyes and his entire face was covered in freckles. I watched his jaw tense up a little and wondered if my secret glances had not been so-secret after all.

“So, how are you?” he finally said as he bit into what was left of his muffin.

“I’m not too bad and you?” I replied.

“I’m not too great either,” he said as he took a long swig of his coffee

I will not go much into detail because after his response it lead to a question of why and how things were with our lives. We talked about everything, our conversation running off tangents as we refilled our coffee cups yet again. He told me his name was Mark and that he was 23. He told me that he wasn’t from here and that it was his first time here because of work. I told him I was Lisa and I was 21. I told him that I had grown up here and knew the town like the back of my hand. We talked for what felt like minutes but was actually a couple of hours, it might sound cliché but I honestly hadn’t had such a refreshing conversation in such a long time and by the end of it we exchanged numbers vowing to return to that same table again in that same diner.

We parted ways and I saw myself feeling all giddy as I walked with a slight skip back home. We continued to meet for coffee every week for weeks on end until weeks turned into months, neither of us ever failing to show up or postpone. I had a time that I specifically reserved for our meet ups. I looked forward to them and would always get so excited as every Thursday approached, the only day he was ever in my town. We talked for hours each time and never ran out of things to talk about even though we had known each other for quite sometime now. In the time of us knowing each other I learnt that his nickname growing up had been ‘squirrel’, a nickname that survived throughout his childhood and creeped into adulthood because of how big his front teeth had been when he was a toddler, he only ate cereal with orange juice because he hated milk and that he liked collecting vinyl records.

I’m looking at him now, his once dark hair now replaced with beautiful silver strands yet still maintaining that same rough cut, laying loosely on that same handsome face I first saw when he walked into the diner, as I write this. It’s been 26 years that have been nothing short of amazing. I can’t pin point the first moment I realized that I was in love with him but I can say I was infatuated by him the very first time my eyes fell on him. If you had told me that I’d meet the love of my life 26 years ago I would’ve never believed it.

I would have never believed I would have been worthy of such love. Mark had given me the type of love only a few are lucky to feel in their lifetime and for that I would forever be in his debt. I can see his chest rising up and down slowly as he lets out a whistle with every time he breathes out. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I wasn’t in that diner, if I wasn’t sitting on that only empty table and if I hadn’t stared at him or noticed him and it makes me quite sad because in a parallel universe I would’ve probably never even met him. All of this and our life together would’ve never existed and I will always be eternally grateful for that 24/7 diner that made a start to the best years of my life.