Part of a free writing project I did in 2016. Picking two words at random, I wrote a short vignette from the first thing that came to mind. 

Words: mirror, ray

The coffee was slunk down on the table in front of her. It sloshed a little over the side of the rim. It was one of those ambiguous white ceramic things that are built for purpose and bought in bulk. Sort of squat and clunky, with a thin gold line painted on the rim of both the cup and saucer. You know the one. And I bet you can imagine the kind of café too—a sort of nondescript, soulless place that one might find themselves drinking a hurried coffee before a meeting in a new part of the city. The part you wouldn’t normally spend much time in. Picture it? That’s the place she was in. The coffee wasn’t that great either. Bitter, yet still somehow watery. Even sugar couldn’t quite revive it. So all in all, a rather humdrum image. As exciting as watching golf—or a fly walk across a window. Dull. 

 Then, as I walked past, she looked up. She couldn’t have meant to, it was one of those fateful coincidences in life that someone like me would read far too much into. Like that time last summer, when I got a bitten by something. I would have thought nothing of it, but it was when I was at home and I happened to be watching Men in Black—classic—and that got me thinking. Bugs. I mean the whole premise of MIB is cockroaches. So then I read way too much into this bite on my arm and got it into my head that the whole flat must be riddled with bed bugs. I turned the whole place upside down that night. 

 The moment she looked up at me was just like that. In that minuscule, momentary event (her looking up at the exact moment I walked past), I magnified the signal into some insuperable thing. It was as if some invisible chord had been lassoed around the both of us and pulled taught by cupid himself. He was smiling proudly from her to me and then back to her and then back to me again. Rays of sunshine bathed us both, like in a movie. I expected her gaze to remain on mine, all sultry like. And then, as if moved by some ocean current of emotion, she would fling her shitty coffee across the table, then flip the table too—for dramatic effect, you know—and she’d bound through the café door and meet me on the path. She’d pause for a second, as if hardly able to contain her lust. Then, she’d leap upon me in this awesome, passionate, wet snog.  

 In this suspended moment of daydreaming her glance into grandiose proportions, I’d remained rooted at the window, a bit gormless looking. I even had my mouth partially open. Idiot. Yet, there she was. Still looking at me through the glass. She had her head cocked quizzically as if trying to figure something out. Looking right at me. I had this surge of feeling come from my belly, really passionate like. I was about to wave. I saw her hand move—she was going to do the same! My heartbeat enough in that second for a whole week.

 But she just rearranged her fringe. Turns out, it was mirrored glass. Never even saw me. Probably just as well. If I’ve learnt one thing from films, it’s that coffee shop romances never last.