Diner and Cigarettes

My friend ate quickly, scarfed up the eggs and mopped up the yolk with the home fries. He wasn’t saying much, and often trailed off in the middle of it. Finished, he rested his chin on his hands, fingers locked together, elbows braced against the table. His gaze ran along the cars in the parking lot and quickly found the horizon. He was thinner and paler than I think I’d ever seen him, but his eyes were perfectly clear.

I had a hamburger. Diners rarely have good hamburgers, I don’t know why. Unless it’s specifically their deal. This one was somehow too salty and flavorless at the same time. But the grease and the Coke helped settle my stomach. No way I had many more nights like last night left in me.

He pulled out a pack of cigarettes and started twirling it, setting it on the table, flipping it, setting it down again. Over and over, in quick, precise movements.

“How much longer, you think?” He asked.

“Tonight and most of tomorrow, at least. Might have to overnight somewhere tomorrow, depends on the weather.”

“Hm. Maybe too long. Maybe not long enough. Don’t know. Don’t know.”

“However long it is, that’s how long we’ve got. Won’t get there any sooner or later than we’ll get there.”

He fell back against his seat, exhaled, and pulled a cigarette out of the pack. Pulled it under his nose, then started flicking and spinning it between his fingers. His hands would never stop when he got like this. Musician’s hands.

I couldn’t force down the last bit of the burger, and set it on the plate in surrender.

“But we’ll get there, you know,” I said. He nodded. “Go have a smoke. No smoking in the car. Dad hated that.”

Caught

As is my habit, I was out for a late-night walk. The rain has been coming and going all evening, and I thought I’d chance it by going out. At first, the only drops I encountered were brief sprinkles knocked loose from leaves by gusts of wind, but eventually rain clouds returned, announcing themselves with lightning flashes and rolling thunder.

The rain came in bursts, and the first caught me near a bus shelter, where I hid for about ten minutes. The second came when I was just a few blocks from home, but luckily I spotted an awning over the entrance of an apartment building.

It’s a particular type of isolation, being trapped on a porch in a rain storm. Very reflective.

My mind turned to past misdeeds. Social situations made far more awkward and drawn out than was necessary. A particular incident swirled in my memory, a long sequence of ill-conceived missteps, confusions, and mistaken intentions and identities. I considered at length how the whole affair could have been avoided had I possessed just a bit more awareness.

Then I moved on to a fictional future, in which I somehow meet that person again. Would they even remember me? It is a fair question whether those events were a minor and forgettable headache to them, or if it all weighed on them even more than on me. I tried to construct plausible explanations for my conduct, excuses for why I did not know the things that would have prevented it all from happening, and of course it all sounded insane and desperate. Would an attempt to make amends with an apology just make everything worse?

But what if they recognized me, caught in my eye a sign of recognition as well, and then I would say nothing?

The multiplying infinity of possibilities ceased when I convinced myself the rain slowed down enough for me to dash home. Oh, to trade all metaphorical puddles for real ones.

Streetlight

The streetlight cast a cone of buzzing orange light, and I stood in the middle of it. Muggy, hot air gave the light a tangible quality.

The circle of light included the sidewalk on which I stood, part of the street, and part of the lawn, which was enclosed with a low wrought-iron fence. The manicured grass was likely a bright green, but under this light it looked dead. A carefully paved path led across the lawn toward a house, whose existence was hinted at by glistening of its windows and the barely distinguishable shapes of its bricks. The house was identifiable within the night’s darkness, but hardly more than a mere shape, a suggestion of an actual house.

Similarly implied were a few bushes, trees, and rooftops which existed as a shade of darkness slightly different from that of the sky.

Beyond, was nothing.

Not nothing, exactly, for it was not a void. It was space filled with a shapeless, unknowable presence which pressed itself upon the back of my skull.

The streetlight flickered. It was too quick for my eyes to adjust, so momentarily I was suspended in the deepest abyss, and whatever roiled beyond the scope of light now stretched toward my skin.

The light came back, but fainter. It flickered and sputtered in an unpredictable series of plunges into impenetrable darkness, each time fading a bit more.

Then it went out.

Then the abyss turned over. Gradually, stars become visible. The moon found its way through tree branches. Candles sprung up in windows of houses I could not have even imagined.

Then, there was a way home.

Bookshelves and happiness

After a moment’s hesitation on the sidewalk – a habit, perhaps, for he always hesitated and always decided the same – he walked into the bookstore. The narrow door jingled behind him. He waived at the cashier, who raised one hand in an automatic greeting, without looking up, and went back to their reading.

He went past rotating displays of postcards and folding city maps. Both looked well-weathered and dusty, but nonetheless he made a mental note to pick up a card and a map on the way out. How much could the city have changed?

Rows of books went the length of the room, and at the far end, a doorway connected to a second room, smaller and with a lower ceiling than the first. He had no particular book in mind, but being in a bookstore has its own purpose. It certainly made browsing more satisfying – he could look at the array of book spines without a filter, taking in every name and title, familiar and familiar, each one a momentary spark of possibility or reminiscence.

At the far end of an aisle he noticed a woman. She wore a knitted sweater over a patterned dress, and kept pushing the same lock of careless hair away from her face. She ran her fingers over the books, smiling, as if selecting a volume through tactile sensation alone. Satisfied, the woman retrieved a book, adding it to the pile she held against her chest.

She went one way, he went another.

The book aisles went on and on. He went through sections on romance, historical fiction, self-help, and nautical manuals. Some shelves had new releases, some merely recent releases, some second-hand, and some rare collectibles, bound in leather with fading gold print. In one corner, several boxes of books were stacked. Each box was marked with a price of $5, though it was unclear if that was for individual books or whole boxes. One of the boxes, beside old paperbacks, had a backgammon set and a pair of sunglasses.

Staircases descended and ascended connecting rooms to other room at unpredictable levels. He passed several windows, all looking out onto a different scene – a courtyard, a busy city square, a jagged lined of rooftops, a wooded green. One window was pitch black. The windows appeared at different levels, once even crossed by the staircase.

The rows of bookshelves went on and on, and so did his happiness.