Avenue C

Avenue C

I can’t even go for a coffee on Sunday morning without falling in love.

She’s sitting across from me right now. Jet black short hair. Harsh cheeks. Dark liner. Green army jacket. You know the type. She’s on her Lindsay Weir trip, and I’m loving every second of it.

Freaks and Geeks was such an underrated show. I wonder if she’d be into it, too. The good stuff always ends too soon.

She’s curled, knees up, on the wooden bench that sits along the coffee shop’s warmth-fogged glass: Americano-to-go in one hand, crumpled thrice-read copy of “Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit” in the other. The maple tree behind her is just beginning to blossom for the season, small buds as brightly colored as her pink lips.

I’m trying to study her but I think I’m doing so with all the subtlety of a busker in 14th Street station.

She looks like she didn’t go out last night. Just my type. My mind is racing. I’m actively concocting an entire Tolkien-tome’s worth of lore about her and her past. She prolly works at Buffalo Exchange, but not in a sad way. She loves fashion but the old stuff. She has an LP collection and a record player, inclusive of Nat King Cole and Bobby Caldwell but also Sza. She’s prolly a Capricorn.

Oh no. She just looked at me. Fuck. Did she notice that I was staring at her?

Did she clue into the fact that I was about to shift from writing the backstory to the active plot line wherein we catch eyes and the book drops from her hand into the formed puddle below her from the tears of joy she cries in that moment when she realizes she too has met another Milhouse?

Did she too in this moment recall Murakami’s “On Meeting The 100% Perfect Girl?” and realize that we once knew each other and we vowed to forget each other and our eternal love as a test to prove that, if it was truly eternal, we would again find one another, years and lives later, and once again return to that abyssal wash of sheer euphoria?

Oh. No. She was looking at a cute dog that just barked behind me. I guess that moment we just shared was mine and mine alone.

I wonder if she’s waiting for someone. She looks comfortable as she’s turning the pages. I hope she’s lonely. No, well, okay. I don’t mean that. I just want to marathon a show I don’t care about with her three blankets and two chip bags deep, you know?

The cuffs on her tan slacks are so neatly folded, sitting there all high and mighty like a rich preppy Upper East Side Dalton School fuck, but like a cool one because they’re resting on top of her black-and-white Jordan 1s.

This is a movie.

I gotta say something. Maybe if I just clear my throat and then awkwardly smile. Let me try that.

Errr. Nope. She looked then looked away.

This is the end.

Wait. Did she just double take? DID SHE JUST SMILE AT ME? IS THIS THE SERIES FINALE?!

Oh no. She’s getting up. She’s walking away! This is it. I have to do something.

I watch as she turns the corner, fleeing away from me and toward the swarming mass of the city’s bodies and cars and buildings and adventures and romances and tragedies, just another apparition in the crowd.

She probably wouldn’t have been into a girl like me anyway.