I held a staring contest with the blank document on the screen. The document won.
I looked up at the others. Stephanie was furiously tapping away at her story. Tim was hunched over his laptop. Karen was deep in her book. With a sigh, I looked back at my laptop again.
There's a drama unfolding in front of me right now.
I want to own a cafe. A cafe with a nice homey feel to it. Maybe on weekends, I'd feature local bands. There would be a bookshelf in the cafe with books from my personal collection, books that I've read and now want to share with others.
"It was the way he sipped his coffee," she told me with a stern glare. "I could just tell, you know? I just knew."
"Yea," I nodded, taking a concentrated, quiet, easy sip of my coffee.
"He slurped it like a pig. His tongue was sticking out." Her eyes wandered out the window. "I don't know. He was a nice guy. But I just knew it wasn't going to work out."
The girl with the brown and blond streaks in her hair brushed the crumbs off the table next to me and into a napkin. Her books plopped onto the table as she scooched into the seat.
A few other tableless customers looked on. She noticed a blond, stocky guy standing to her right and smiled at him.
"Would you like to share this table with me?" she asked.
It's a sunny Sunday afternoon. I'm back at Borders again. There's a precocious performer picking a guitar, providing a lively atmosphere. Dozens of readers are crowded into this dainty dining area, listening, reading, and sipping espressos.
"What do you think that means, exactly?"
I looked over to where here was pointing. A cute girl was perched on the round bench, elbows forward on the coffee table, talking to her friends. The smooth skin of her back was exposed, along with the top of a tiny purple thong.
"Every girl has thought about either being a lesbian or being a stripper or hooker, you know."
The guys around the table blinked. Geng smirked and looked at her sideways. "Ho ho yea?"
"Yea, totally."
"She's only doing this gig until her ex-husband's alimony check comes," I say. The woman with the deep, sunken eyes strums her guitar in a lament about lost loves.
"That is, IF he doesn't skip bail again and fall back into a life of robbing little old ladies at church," Nancy adds.
"You have a boyfriend? Well, I have a wife."
She laughs and plays with a lock of hair around her ear.
Weekly random rambles, musings & writings of Mike Lee in San Francisco, CA