Motes preserved by layers of memory, almost a decade later:
With the back tip of a spoon handle, I chivied irritating flecks of grounds out from the sugar~silted dregs of my coffee.
He polished off his balsamic~anointed oysters & vinegar~steeped fries, and artlessly sucked the salt~sour off his fingers to round out the meal, ingenuously apologising for such a base lack of etiquette.
To sit out on the terrace we'd had to wipe the table and chairs dry; the air had smelt brackish. Now, the sun had just set, and nacreous clouds gently scudded against the breeze into the maw of a night sky.
The formality of a first date had been shucked away; and baroqueness of conversation had dissolved into idly chatting about the other people we'd dated.
I had come off badly by comparison, in terms of sheer quantity of stories to tell. My date was a people~person; I am a people~pauper.
Outgoing & affable, charming & witty, he thought nothing of diving bare~chested into the sea of humanity to hunt for pearls.
I'm a thin~skinned, ascetic~humoured, vinegar~faced fishwife; so I muck about on the shore looking for the interesting bits of shell that have washed up, allowing The Drink to wet only my feet.
So we played the get~to~know~you game of what do you have in your pockets? And as he held my secondhand leather coat, he ran his palm over the nubs where buttons were missing, and brushed the worn enamel buttons left dangling by threads; and he asked why.
And I explained that, when it comes to buttons, while I can look at them and physically see them, I don't in fact actually see them because they simply don't register as a problem. And if I don't see a problem with something, it doesn't occur to me how other people might.
"Ah! well," said he, "well, there we are, then."
"I'm like that with my relationships when things start to go wrong. I can see the threads unraveling; but I just can't be bothered to fix it."
He plunked a sugar cube into his cola & we listened to it foam; the sound grew into mizzles of rain, each short~lived; in~between each mizzle, the faint smell of a burnt-out match.
White noise dropped to a meditative lull; the darkness took on a moon~splashed sheen, a magistery of pearl.
And I thought: how interesting an interpretation. I didn't think that was quite what I meant.
A rather interesting bit of shell, that one.
Posted by edgar at May 29, 2003 09:51 AM