It is going to happen
02 March 2011 11:11 AM Categories: Fiction | Writing prompts
I see someone cute across the street, or getting on the bus, and I decide: they are mine. I will find them tomorrow, next week, I’ll follow them off the bus, I will charm them with my wits and my good looks, with the flash of green in my eyes, and they will be mine.
The number of worlds I can imagine is infinite. You, twentysomething girl with the straight brown hair and the earbuds and the dusky complexion. You stare insolently from your sludgy BART seat, you scrape your plump suede boots on the flattened rug. You act as if you are the only one on this train. I see you. You get off at Embarcadero and I follow, though I wasn’t planning on getting off just yet, was just riding the rails looking for destiny. You will be mine, we’ll move in together, two women surprised by the pull of our bodies, we’ll adopt babies and have torrid affairs and violent reunions. You will be mine, but you will also break my heart.
There is pleasure in the imagination, in my ability to meet, break up, and make up in the space of ten minutes. The man I pass almost every morning on my way to the café? He doesn’t make eye contact, stares at his too-white sneakers, shambles his skinny legs across the street sometimes when he sees me coming. This is a challenge, to find a life with the dodgy-eyed man whose hair is wiry and grey, who wears faded jeans and sweatshirts and wants nothing to do with me. You will be mine. I’ll stumble into you one morning, with hot coffee, with a bag of danishes. I’ll break the ice. Your eyes will meet mine and I’ll see your beauty, the beauty in ice-blue, will know that all your reticence is Scandinavian, that all it will take is my warmth, the touch of my hand on your shoulder and you will speak.
Coffee will turn to burgers. Burgers will lead to pasta. Pasta will lead to late night cocktails, to your place, a sad studio over a tattoo parlor. You’re an artist, or were an artist. There was a divorce, maybe two divorces, a child (or children) you never see in another city. I will listen. I will get you to cry to me, but I won’t tell you anything. Or I’ll give you glimpses: the story of the time I fell from the bar and broke my arm, the night my mother’s boyfriend slipped into my room, the way a book changed my life. I’ll confuse you with the stories, you won’t be able to thread them together.
Our kisses will be soft, then hard and wanting and the sex we will have will humiliate both of us in different ways. Two weeks after bumping into you, I will change my daily habits so that we never cross paths again. You will take it in stride, another cruel woman, another world glimpsed and destroyed.
In the meantime, I pass you on the sidewalk, I watch your gaze drift to the side, to the passion flower vine in full bloom knotting itself to a chain-link fence.
Thought it was time for something else besides writing on "the struggle." Another (fictional) post in first person, from the prompt "It is going to happen" from about a month ago.
Image by blmurch.
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