Coffee.

The curtains flew a bright picture of yellow or orange or a mélange de deux against a small opening, a measly excuse for a window, lush green, now brightly lit by the descending sun’s orange. 

The brightness would have been the reason for my fixated gaze had you not walked in when you did, in the white shirt holding itself together amidst a criss-cross of wrinkles and beige pants that could camouflage with my skin. Your hair, dark brown, now interlocked with shiny strands of golden. The brightness making its way to every part of you, with the one half of your glistening unshaved visage perking up with glee, almost inviting its share of vitamin d. Your face descends to a length that carries with it the beads of a tribe we flaunt, with the beads themselves adapting to your noiseless demeanour. Your arms or whatever of them could be seen from the sleeves you must have folded so callously, intercepted with the veins, seem to possess the kind of strength your exterior plans not to reveal. Your fingers, long, graceful, casually mocking the not so aggressive beard your chin bears, not so happily.

You spot me too, albeit for a short second.
Theshortestsecondofmylife.

So short, that one minute you are sure to have seen it, but the very next, you doubt your own assumption. If someday I were to recount this story, and if someone would ask me, “But well, did HE see you?”, the only bereft response that would escape my lips would be, “HE did. I am not too sure, I have no way to prove it but I’m sure he did. Even though I did not experience a time lapse of any kind to prove my surety. But I do remember the smallest eye icons of mine gazing deeply, directly into his. Yes, HE saw me, I’m sure, I think.”

In spite of the rambling, the answer would make no sense, and my audience would immediately judge me stupid.

But at that moment, all I could think was of all the possible way I could get you to see me again without having to scream my lungs out to you.

So I did that what anyone else would have, not.
Ichangedthesong.
It was my way of measuring you to my yardsticks, I have no correct way of explaining this, but for me, for the sake of my knees that seemed incapable of being stationary that moment, you had to know the song that would play next. What that would establish and how I would find out for true if you indeed were aware of the song, is something I cannot answer. But what had to be, had to be.

The song began with its warning introductory rhythm riffs. Speaking of still life water colours and shadows in the room because of the sunlight rushing through the curtain lace but most of all sifting through the dangling conversation. I saw, with astute senses, your lips curl into the slightest twirl, so slight that everyone witness to it would swear it never happened. But I knew. If music could trigger a sensory nerve of knowing, loving and ease, I could swear at that moment, that you knew the song as I did. As well as I did.
For had I been in a small coffee house, aware of my solitude but silently appreciative of it too, and had ‘The Dangling Conversation’ made it to the talk of the room, I would have tried and succeeded, for most parts, to show my ignorance.

Because the music that you carry on your skin, every awake moment, you confess not to its seductiveness, at least never publicly. You could never bring yourself to celebrate it, discuss it or enjoy it outside the comfort of your own assumed space. You carry it on and within you, like a well-guarded secret that if revealed, would reveal your innermost space of sanctity that bore nest to thoughts you alone are privy too.

But just then, at my moment of immeasurable joy, Idiedinsidealittle.

Knowing fully well that this image of you is tagged to my song for life. That today, I could know you, love you and disappoint you, and refuse to acknowledge the song that brought me up, furthermore. Or I could never know what you could come up to be, fabricate you in my head, you reading your Robert Frost, as ‘we sit and drink our coffee’ and marginalise myself for an unrequited tale.

Whichever way, I had made the stupid mistake of attaching yet another darn recollection with a song, which it shall now conjoin with to eat up space on my skin. As I see you sip the coffee I prepared with a secret vendetta to avenge this acquisition, I decide that knowing you, loving you is my only road to redemption. The fact that our knowledge of each other would perhaps ruin this day at the coffee house, not striking me as strongly as you did, is an irony I would escape.