She spoke rather enthusiastically of her planned trip to India, of her love for yoga and her passion for the pursuit of enlightenment. I was never one for spiritualism but she seemed so full of life and she had this appetite for experiences that was awe inspiring. Her hands moved feverously when she spoke, almost spastic but my focus, never more clear in recent memory remained on her eyes. They were soft with nativity but they carried with them a profound sense of conviction. Many before me have spoken of the eyes as the window to the soul and I had never fully understood the sentiment until I found mine intertwined with hers. Like a bridge over a seething river; our gaze had brought us closer. I felt as though we were no longer divided by ego, pride or other such frivolous illusions.

The conversation flowed so effortlessly, one could only describe it as natural. Had I been a determinist I would have regarded the meeting as fated to occur. She could shut me up just by talking; I always loved that in a woman. My fixation slowly slid down from her eyes to her mouth and almost like a fever coming over me I wanted to kiss her in that instant but you can’t just lock lips with your waitress in the middle of a café during lunch. Once again the nuisance of social structure and etiquette impeded upon my desires or so I told myself; knowing full well I could have just as easily stood up, grabbed her by her narrow hips and pulled her in tight for a good old fashion French baiser. Instead I allowed my longing to fume up inside of me like a tremendous furnace clouding my thoughts with black smoke and self-doubt. It was not society who was stopping me; it was me who was stopping me. Regardless of socially appropriate behavior we humans had always had a choice but like fools we often idly choose to cave under the pressure of our cultural conditioning. I like all cowards before me, used words like "can’t" as an excuse to allow moments of beauty to slip from my fingers and into the abyss. It was like a black hole, an all devouring entity that consumed all of our potential greatness and crushed it into nothingness.

Maybe in some alternative universe, somewhere in the infinite there was me sitting at that café gushing over her and she was standing there all delicate-like, telling me how she wanted to spend a month in India. Maybe that version of me acted on his impulse and he felt alive when he kissed her; in a way I may never feel. I hope somewhere in the vastness of this existence there is someone enjoying that kiss because if I squandered the only possible chance for that instance to ever occur then I cannot conceive of a greater tragedy.