You see what you bring with you. A collaboration with EC (@erroneouschoices)

The tabletop was worn smooth in places, the grain darkened by years of spilled coffee and idle hands. My thumb found one shallow groove near the edge and followed it without thinking. The coffee smelled burned. Chairs scraped against old wood beneath music I could not place. I took the table near the back, where the room could pass in front of me without asking anything, and set my phone face down beside a coffee I wanted until I had it. An older couple shared a cinnamon roll by the window. A man worked alone behind the blue light of his laptop, typing a sentence, deleting it, then beginning again. Along the wall, a woman sat with both hands around her cup, watching the door each time it opened. The pale rings drying into the tabletop seemed darker than they should have. Torn sugar packets lay near the legs of the tables. Across from the woman by the wall, an empty chair waited beneath the window.

The window had a little spot on it and I briefly wondered about its origin when it dawned on me that it’s all about the eyes. Of course there’s the aroma of something mocha flavored, the sometimes hard scraping of chairs on the floor and the murmur of conversation, but really, it’s the eyes. A coffee shop experience is never truly had unless you look into people’s eyes. And you couldn’t beat his, they told a story of morning poppies and rust colored memories. 
My intentions weren’t clear to anyone but me. I sat at a two person table but I wasn’t expecting anyone. I was avoiding. Of course I felt people looking at me and then looking away. I imagined the things they were thinking and I was comfortable being left alone while I stared at everything, pretending not to notice anything. Until I captured a glimpse of the leftover petal promises in his eyes.

I had decided too much about her by then. That was the danger of an empty chair. It invited a story the way a raw place invites a finger. I had made her lonely before she ever looked at me, had given the cup in her hands a history it did not ask for. Then she turned from the door, and whatever I had written across her went briefly useless. Her hair was pulled back loosely, blonde made darker where the rain had touched it, and her skin held the kind of color that made me think she knew the ocean personally. But it was her eyes that unsettled me. Brown, direct, not asking for rescue and not offering any. She looked at me as if she had caught me trespassing somewhere private, and I looked down at my coffee like a man suddenly interested in being innocent.

Our glance was brief but lingering at the same time. As he looked away my eyes wandered to his grip on his cup and his white knuckles told me I had unnerved him. But I had moved on from his hand to his full lips, having the sudden urge to be the cup that he placed between them. Then realized he could be a serial killer and told myself to settle down.

People like him never knew what they possessed. That made sense to me, they couldn’t look into their own eyes and witness being spread open like gospel, They focused on things about themselves that only they could know as if the world was criticizing, trying to be something on the outside because all of our societal expectations are so god damned harsh and erroneous. They never knew and what poured out of their stare was the vulnerability of a lifetime. And that, that right there was the thing that made blooms burst open and angels fall like rain.

When I looked up again, she had turned back toward the window. The door opened twice. No one came for her. No one came for me. The old couple gathered their coats and left half the cinnamon roll behind. The man with the laptop finally stopped deleting whatever sentence had been failing him and closed the screen with both hands. For a moment, I wanted to believe the room had offered me something, some small proof that the ache inside me had not made me impossible to see. But wanting has always been too quick to call itself truth. She was still only a woman by the wall, and I was still only a man at the back table with cold coffee and nowhere I needed to be. I understood, briefly and stupidly, that she would leave in a direction that had nothing to do with me, and some part of me would still feel the subtraction. I stood, left the cup where it was, and walked out before I could make another life from what was only a glance.