I see a Woman eating her muffin looking at Man who is looking looking into the depths of his paper cup and the wrinkles and rivers on the back of his hand thinking When did I get those? Coffee Cup looking at the blue bin in the corner Coffee Cup thinking Well, I guess this is how it goes
The secret force that wrenches eyes upward from the secret morning monologues happens like electricity happens and Man sees Woman's eyes and frowns and can't tell whether they are blue or brown.
Crumbs are on her lap. Man doesn't notice but Woman thinks he does Moving imperceptibly and not wasting a calorie she flutters her hands over the warm loaves of her thighs. Man notices an ephemeral strain Simon and Garfunkle and becomes aware of a softening within his sternum and electrons slowing, softing, into a May spring aesthetic Woman rubs her finger which does not have a ring and Coffee Cup wonders if it will still have sentience within the bin or if the world with all its broken beauty and mornings and warm hands will suddenly just stop everything?
I look at my keys. The sort that express, not the sort that open doors and drawers but even these, time to time, will fall beneath the wooden floors.
Man pulls his long coat off the back of his chair without ceremony rises and turns to go leaves his cup on the table for a coffee girl to attend to and exits as the rain turns to snow.
Woman sits. And sits. Woman might order another pumpkin muffin. Her knees are chilled, watching her pinkly from the edge of a pencil skirt like children's faces from a blanket. A moment later she makes that same comparison and laughs internally without gesture or sound.
And Woman looks around.
Woman smiles. Not because of Man or muffin or the secret life of a Coffee Cup but because she is Woman struck lively by the sudden meta fleeting passage of The Bigger and her eyes, definitively brown spark like bumper car antennae and struck by magic, the same magic electricity for an irreversible instant meet mine.
And for one fourteenth of a moment Woman knows Me with all her life. I shiver and she lobs me the red bean bag and I hold the image in my mind like a relic of the living divine.