The predictability of life had hit him hard in the last decade. Sometimes he would sit, and watch people standing in lines at food trailers. The cloudy days outside, during the last summer, seemed to accurately mirror the weather in his brain. Not a sad, rainy cloud cover, but a shade and comfort that allowed him to sit and confirm his feelings about human behavior. Counting down from 3....2...1, he could single out the person that would switch from the pressure from one foot to the other. This is not a story of boredom that would normally come with that ability. This is the story of his willingness to resolve himself to the unpredictability of something that he was even more highly skilled at predicting.
"Watch yourself", he would whisper into his own ear. Doing this became instinctual to him. Slightly whispering out loud. These things that he should say only in his mind, had become a habit that was ongoing since elementary school. Hoping no one could hear these whisperings, followed this same age long process.
"Why?", she asked, in the same whispered tone. Leaning in slightly, as if they had just shared a secret. Yet, there was no other occupants of their picnic table. In the second, literally second, between that question, and his response, he pictured this in his mind.
The way she hugged him as she left that evening, didn't contain any different inflection of body language, than any other friend that had left his side after a night of drinking any loud 'talking". He tried to do the same. Tried to hug her just as ordinary, and plain, as he knew she was hugging him. Yet, her hair always seemed to catch him just right. Directly in his open mouth. Softly blowing air through his slightly open lips would normally cause the hair to leave, but her long fragrant locks defied physics. Which, he noticed, is the same thing his heart defied everytime she held him close. If even for that second.
"Oh, nothing. Just trying to remember something", he dismissively said. She knew this wasn't the truth because he could never remember anything. With a mind that could recite the air velocity, and speed, of a penny falling from the Empire State Building. He couldn't even remember the color of the couch sitting the living room, of her house, that they literally just left thirty minutes ago.
This was them. Sitting on this bench. Watching a slow moving crowd. Dreaming of what was happening, currently.
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