I walked to the cafe this evening. I had not done this in days because they had been long, and when not that, they had been stormy. I crossed the patio and pushed the glass door, which was locked. The lights were still on, so I stood beside some girls who, I realised, were waiting. But I had not yet decided to wait, and then, I decided it was not worth it, that the walk to the coffee shop was the change of pace I needed in the first place. The coffee is but a dog ear in the corner of that chapter.
I walked away, but as I walked over the grass and out the gates, I could not help but think of how everything was topsy-turvy this year. I had noticed the blossoming sidewalk on my way, with bougainvillaea and other flowers I do not know the name of yet. I whiffed their aroma as I spontaneously bent and manoeuvred my way from under them, and I remembered June was about to begin. It was a tardy year, and in some way, it was the first time the world emulated my disposition.
Then, I thought of the arbitrariness that surrounded me, of how we rarely ever knew what we would do or say until we did those things. It’s all in the capricious decisions based on the most flimsy rationale that life happens, justified only by the person making them. The rest is but entanglement, how paths intertwine and how each decision affects the other, and often, we remain entirely unaware of our impact in changing the tempo of someone’s life. It was the most obvious observation made nonchalantly on an unremarkable evening. For a second, I thought about all the people I had crossed paths with, how we had gone our separate ways without realising what the last word was, and that is what had all my attention for the rest of the evening—of how little it all had mattered, how little I had thought about it, and how we often only collide like molecules in a room.
I reckon if I made small talk with those waiting alongside me outside the locked glass door, I would know a few more people in the city, but then, eventually, it would all come down to not knowing each other. I would move someplace else, or they would stop coming to the coffee shop, and we would not realise a thing like no one never does.