(from a larger fiction piece)
We sat across from that fabled coffee shop. We had picked our coffee (and tea) and were sitting outside on the open deck. With me, it had to be a coffee shop, right? I would always choose a good coffee over almost any other food or drink. I never managed to tell you this. When I was in younger, in my 20s and I had still not experienced enough poisons, I had walked into a London pub, my first at that time, and asked for a cup of dark boiling liquid....and they had all thought I was apocalypse nutty. I am still the same in my head, never changed a bit. Anyway, this coffee story here is a digression, isn't it?
We were chatting up about nothing and yet everything. Laughing like pigs. We would grin like sharks. I have never opened up that way again. You genuinely brought out the funnest side of me. I have little of it (the fun I mean), but you extruded the malt for the last drop of joy.
You were often prone to sudden changes in tone and mood. I realised it later that it comes from possibly a deep seat of conflicts and turmoils. Possibly. Today is not about that musing though.
At some point, you shifted into a sombre gear. Staring at your cup of tea, you said, "Tail, we don't have a future. We never had. We are just lighting fires in a forest, with no plan or no end.". Then you looked deep into my eyes, that look of utter desolation if there was one. If had not already known, I most definitely knew in that moment, that I was a very large sliece of your world, and right now, it was thrashing around in your head.
I remember that moment clearly. I had a deep temptation to tell you about "being in the moment, chasing joy....", the usual dipshit trope that I espouse most times.
Instead, I took a long pause and a deep sigh (and hence gave up some seconds of my life), and said, "I have always been a wannabe poet. Do you know - I chose to be one, to escape the reality that I have never possibly dealt well with. My poetry is a rope of steady escapism. Though she is not one my favorite poets, there is a poet called Mary Oliver, who says something that has always stayed with me. She says, that if as a poet, we cannot believe in angels, then there is no chance they will ever exist. Ever."
After a stretch of silence I added, "Let happy accidents happen, na? If even we, don't believe in possibilities, then there are truly none. This world slowly ends."
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