I demand that you see me as how I think I am
in the world as I believe it to be
and not as you think I am
in the world as you see it.
Space Walk
Bored and restless, he left the table in the cafe and walked to stretch his legs. He walked without thought under the trees, sometimes watching the traffic as he went or other pedestrians, but mostly looking inward, until he found himself at one of observation decks. It was empty. He stepped up to look out the windows.
Space seemed as empty as the observation deck. Readouts clicked, whirled, and blinked on panels of information presented in red, blue, green, and amber characters below the window. It all seemed too abstract for consideration. Three things remained concrete to him for now. One, he and his family had made it onto the Ark. Two, they’d left Earth behind. Three, he probably wouldn’t live to see the new world, but his son would.
Right now, those three things were all that mattered.
Telling
Beers glasses were raised and clinked together. Tastings followed. The trio got down to business.
“How’d it go with the date?” Ron asked Pat.
“Good, real good.” Pat smiled. “Third one, so you know what that means.”
Bryan laughed. “Is that what that still means?”
“Yes.” Pat nodded. “Indeed, it does.”
Ron raised his glass. “To your new girlfriend? Or is it too early?”
Pat grimaced. “It might be too early. She’s a swell person, wonderfully intelligent and accomplished, sexy, of course — ”
“Of course,” Ron said as Bryan said, “That’s a sexist attitude.”
“It is, but she is a knockout.” After glancing over his shoulders, Pat leaned in over the table. The other two leaned in as well. “The only thing is, she farts a lot,” Pat said in a low voice. “They don’t make any noise, so it’s not that, but they smell terrible.”
“She farts?” Bryan said.
Pat nodded. “And it’s not a little poot now and then. When she farts, I want to flee like the villagers running from Godzilla. And it’s not her fault. We’ve talked about it. She’d apologized after I complained about the rank smell invading my car. She told me it was a side effect of a medicine she’s been on a long time. She’s tried changing her diet and she’s looked into other meds, but nothing will work for her. And anxiety, like from dating, apparently makes it worse.”
“Wow.” Looking at Bryan, Ron sat back. “That’s a shame. A smelly farter. Damn”
Pat sighed. “Yeah, I’d hate for it to end for that, because she’s otherwise so wonderful, and I feel lucky to know her and be dating her.”
Bryan nodded. “Have you told her about your troubles in peckerville?”
Sitting back, Pat sipped his beer a moment and then smiled. “No. The way I see it, there’s no sense in telling her about that until I know if I can live with the farting.”
Breaking it Down
While working on the yard and house today, songs run through my head. I don’t mind it if they’re barefoot, but some of them wear heavy combat boots. That leaves a mark.
One song was the Rupert Holmes song, “Escape”. Most know it as “The Piña Coladas Song”. It’s all about how badly Rupert and his lovely lady were doing. He sees an ad in the newspaper’s personal columns and reads, “If you like piña coladas and getting caught in the rain. If you’re not into yoga, if you have half a brain. If you like making love at midnight in the dunes of the cape. Then I’m the love that you’ve looked for, write to me and escape.”
So he writes to the paper, answering the ad. They meet, and guess what? It’s his own lovely lady that he’s meeting. She’s the one that put the ad in the paper! So, Rupert continues, then we laughed for a moment and I said, “I never knew
That you like piña coladas and gettin’ caught in the rain. And the feel of the ocean and the taste of champagne.”
Mind you, she’s advertised for a lover; he answered that ad. They were both looking for someone else.
At this point, in real life, if he said, “I never knew that you like piña coladas, she’d reply, “That’s because you never listen to me.” Then it’d probably be on. He’s already confessed that he was tired of her. She’s clearly tired of him, too.
Yeah, I don’t see a happy ending here. I don’t think that either one is the lover that the other one was trying to find.
Of course, my mind also suggested, “Well, maybe it’s a small town. What are the odds of her putting the ad in and him answering? Those odds improve if it’s a small town.”
Then my mind went all Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind on me. I imagined the bar patrons familiar with the situation saying, “Oh, no, here we go again.”
I concluded from this that my romantic band of my spectrum of being must be tiny.
Dead Voice
The dead voice comes from my girlfriend’s friend
She tried to tell what was to come in the end.
She said, “You think she loves you and she probably does,
but she’s a minute lover, and your minute’s almost up.”
I declined to hear her lines, I knew what the was, was.
Because I knew better, I knew how I feel, I knew the moment,
I knew my feelings were real.
That must count for something in a life of change.
If you can’t trust yourself, what else remains?
I told myself, she’s wrong, it may have been that way before,
but this sex is love, of that I was sure.
Fast forward the way that time flies in our lives.
Like birds we see in the corner of our eyes.
Here and then gone leaving echoes of their songs,
leaving us to wonder and question, where’s it all gone?
Hot Coffee
He said, “Coffee.” Then he looked aside. “It’s getting hot out there.”
“Yes.” She smiled. “I’m surprised that you want hot coffee on a day like this.”
“I like the smell of hot coffee.” He grinned. “It helps me focus.”
Nodding, she slid a mug of steaming coffee across the counter. “I know what you mean.”
Michael Seidel, writer 