I’ve ordered and carried my steaming cup of brown to my table to ignore the falling snow beyond the walls of this box.
My clothes are wrong, my hair as well.
I just cut it, and everyone knows which mistakes I made.
A man sneezes and the song changes.
Better not make eye contact with anyone; I am not in their league, here at the muddy spoon cafe.
Chewing so loudly in the de-creeping silence,
these safe, polite, quiet ones.
I am the creep here. I am different.
My thighs are tense.
Hunching over the paper, arms tense and clutching  a gnarled red pen--
It’s probably self-indulgent to even sign my name.
Someone’s shuffling cards.
I almost forgot.
The awkwardness I’m filled with breathes out a short sigh when I realize
--my part’s over.
“Do you know Sanskrit? Do you know what that is?”
A woman asks another.
I want to choke on the pretension
The tenseness, I adjust my leg to relieve pressure on my ankle.
Why can’t I just enjoy the snow? That’s all I really came here for-- well, and the coffee.
I hear a woman cough with an unaffected tenor, which would convey her gender to an interested party but to me carries no intonation.
I wonder if the girl I recognize from class thinks I’m following her.
I came here for coffee, sweetheart!
Is it yet too hot for me to dare a drink?
I can see it, the steam, rising out of the corner of my eye.
I haven’t looked away from my hand in twenty minutes.
“Who am I?” they may be asking myself for me.
I don’t have a clue.
They can think about that problem
for themselves
while they’re lonely
in their forties.
I’m lonely now and I hope not to live
that long.
Here, we pretend not to see each other’s faces
in the gleaming presence of steaming cups.
“I don’t want to wonder about that.”
I realize there’s nothing I even deem worth writing down.