A thin slice of lemon floats in the jug of water placed on our table as we are seated. We sit in silence with menus, looking them over. He isn't going to stay long, just get a drink before leaving to complete assorted tasks in his day. We sit in an assumed silence, foiling the chatter and light all around. His face has been written on quite markedly by her, but not in her hand. The hasty scrawl has wet his eyes. His face is downcast and torn with some deep and hidden emotion. Love is cheap as any free thing, like air�and just as readily polluted. People burn people and love gets polluted.
�Florida,� I say, making it mean something.
�Yeah.�
A fire is devastating the city's physical history. Men are coating the flames in water, hoping they will change and go out. Six alarms, five alarms, smoke rises and becomes cloud in the sky. Inside, we sit pensively and order. I order a wrap and an americano. He orders some kind of smoothie. He
pours water past the lemon into his cup and sips on it.
I think it would have been easier for him if she had cut ties completely. He doesn't know what to feel this way. I can only sit and talk with him, and treat him like a full and complete person with everything worth caring for present and shining. I imagine that he walks into a doctor's office with a complaint of pain. He sits and waits inside the little room, absentmindedly toying with the roll-out paper sheet covering the examination table until the door opens. He's sobbing. The doctor enters and looks him over.
�What's the matter?�
�I feel a pain.�
�Where does it hurt?�
�I'm not sure.�
�Can you point to where?�
He moves his hand solemnly over his body, from his wet cheek down over his chest, and still lower over his ribs and stomach. He looks back and says, �No.�
A siren sounds from the street outside, passing. Inside there is empty noise from every table around us. Somewhere, blocks away, water is freezing in layers over telephone poles and uniforms.
�Florida will be good. It will be warmer there. You'll feel good there, warmer.�
My cup is empty. I don't really know what Florida will be like, but I know I'd rather be heading there. I tell him this and he smiles, thank God. It's a nice one, too.
I really would rather be heading somewhere else. Not just back to normal, endlessly. I can't seem to settle well. I yank myself out of everything just to feel pulled. When was the last time I felt like him? I pretend that I'd rather be lonely than sick sad, as if the sickness were the entire movement of love. I don't know love; I can say that. Not in a lasting way. Not romantic love that brightens as it fades into lasting love, anyhow. Not any more than an easily-forgotten-when-I-need-to-cut-and-hide-from-it kind of love. I know that, but I call it circumstantial folly�what else could it be? I want to know it, though�if only I knew what settling was.
He has already paid for his drink, and rises to give me an honest and heartfelt goodbye. It is a nice one, too. Only good things will exist between us when we meet again further along in the year, and we will both feel something different moving in our lives regardless of our quiet moment here. A loving friendship is a kind of fire that is fed and maintained with each meeting�like a cooking fire, just right for boiling water without spilling any.
Warm water settles into puddles and oceans but both are conditioned to evaporate under the sun. Rivers are not settled in the same way, but are settled in themselves just as well�in their ceaseless movement. I dream about settling down, but I don't know how.
My wrap comes. I pour water into my cup and take a sip. It is warm and the lemon is quite bitter.
before || after
