Untitled Prose 2

SIKANDAR - 21st AUGUST!!! Watch me movie, be entertained!

The rains returned the next day, with eagerness and vigor. They slapped against the windows like children begging him to come out and play. And so he met them halfway. Standing out on the balcony with his morning coffee getting diluted by the rain plinking in. He smiled wet smiles, and brushed the happy drops off his eyes. The world below him was rushed and potholed, and soaked and miserable. Up here, the world hissed with pleasure, and the coffee was good.

He hadn’t called her back yet, he was proud of that. Silly thing to be proud of, but he wasn’t very good at waiting, playing out the game like he should. An old girlfriend had told him he gave too much too easily, that was why people found it easy to break his heart. Of course, she said this just before doing a damn fine job of it herself. But he found it hard to hate her for it. The smile of hers nestled in his arms was still visual poetry, and the memories of her in bed, wearing nothing but his tie…People like her never understood, that the heart is never broken, it’s tempered, it’s honed, it’s reinforced. He was the way he was, and he had stopped fighting that a long time ago. “To thine own self be true,” wrote the Bard, and the Bard was never wrong.

The day was promising to get only worse from that morning coffee. Cases piled up on his desk like regrets. His secretary was starting to truly hate him for facing all the clients and the phone calls alone. But he couldn’t get back to the work. Not yet. The thirteen days weren’t over. But he needed to hear something good, something light, and so he called her after breakfast. But she was still asleep and hungover. He called after lunch, but she was busy. And again after an evening meeting his secretary ambushed him with, he called, and again his call rang and rang and choked away. Just when he thought it was time to try and reimagine the day without her smile in it, she sent him a message: “Sorry busy meet tonight still? Want to see you ;)”

He laughed with equal measure delight and disgust. The former because she was still a part of his day, and the latter at the ease with which she plucked his heart strings, the callous “;)” with which she sent needles into his patient flesh. He wondered again, do pretty girls attend a secret night school that teaches them the art of man-manipulation?

She wanted him to come see a movie, and said come early, come at five thirty. He arrived with a few minutes to spare. It had stopped raining but the threat of it hung dark and brooding above, and all the mice were huddled under awnings and inside the damp, musty indoors. He bought a muffin and a coffee and sat out on the stairs leading up to the theatre. For once the city smelled clean and fresh and happy. It wasn’t true, he knew that, but he was grateful for the momentary easing of his cynicism.

The muffin should have tasted like blueberries, instead it had the peculiarly non-specific muffinness that these fucking chain coffee shops were so good at concocting. He called it pseudo-food, for people to beaten down to bother asking for more. He threw it away and watched the local pack of dogs fight over it. Truth of the world laid bare, he thought.

His stomach filled with ice and apprehension. That’s how he knew she had arrived. His body always knew before he did. It filled with that sick, anticipatory mixture of fear and lust and a little bit of what might have been called love, once.