A Suit of Stars

I can sometimes be obsessive-compulsive when it comes to the way I organize a room, or the methods I undertake in order to properly clean and maintain a treasured space. I pay particular heed to the shadows of objects, where the light hits them and from what angles, and even more so to the shapes the shadows resemble. Even the shadow of a tiny leaf from my houseplant (her name is Desdemonia) has the potential to cast a creepy visual across my living room at the right time of night. I do my best not to tread where the shadows lay out of respect for their art. Shadows, too, have personality. It is quite the game of hopscotch when I have to pee in the middle of the night. 

But I’m more concerned about the sources of light. These hallway lights, these phone-camera flashes, (this laptop screen), these nightlights, these candle flames, these distant stars, these melodies in a stranger’s voice as they talk to their pet, those 4th attempts at correcting an imperfection on the canvas, you can see them flicker if you look closely enough without blinking. They are fleeting reverberations to be witnessed, if not idolized and marveled over. Once in a blue, you’ll even have the honor of hearing them sing. A song not intended for human ears, but found always present in human hearts. These lights are dim but they never fade. They’re the best of the best. You make friends of them. You make songs about them, you cook for them, you sing back to them to mimic their miracle, you admire their unique way of explaining things and you borrow each other’s light, you twirl in the shadows of their absence and you strike a pose in their overcast. All to bottle that very special twinkle. 

I collect all the stars I’ve stumbled across, those eenie weenie teenie tiny flickers of bedazzled grandeur felt between the grains of sand in an hourglass.  A story here, a sculpture there, a peculiar sound the wind makes as it howls between the houses that are too close together but not far enough apart, the perfectly made mistakes. They all have the same magic, anyways. The power which captivates your undivided attention. The divine coincidence, the spectacle of the true. I keep them with me wherever I go and I adorn myself in their wonder so everyone who meets me can also get to see a little bit of what I’ve seen along the way. Swag very much dripping in borrowed light. Unblinking. Unbinding. Unbroken.

Viva Las Vagueness

Deep, deep down, in the shallowest depths,

I’ve placed all my bounced checks into perilous bets.

While I outline the edges of subliminal threats,

I hit the jackpot of flashbacks of cherished regrets.

So I sing all the poetry I cannot write,

And I paint all the poetry I cannot sing

In hopes to sculpt poetry that cannot fade, that cannot blur, that cannot sting.

Had I known that the quicksand would be this slow

I’d have waived you goodbye as I shook you hello. 

What happens in vagueness stays in vagueness.

In an odd twist of fate, all the coping mechanisms

Turned out to be worse than the actual problem.

And only after walking on the moon yourself

Do you realize all those steps backwards 

Are actually just part of the dance.

No amount of serenity helps you accept changes you don’t know about.

And having the courage to change it is reductive if you still ask permission.

Knowing the difference is wasted when all you can do is watch. 

There's a subtle wisdom in what isn’t said.

All the sacrilege is in a co-dead language at this point, the words left on the doorstep that can’t and won’t be used against you in the court of law. A strand of hay in a stack of needles. Only in riddles is the truth ever comfortably being talked about anymore. Were it not for the fear and the loathing, gambling this way would have an allure. Were it not for the bet I made, the casino wouldn't exist

A Cult of Personality and the Lack Thereof

How do you tell a friend that they’re actively participating in a cult? More so, how do you do it without insulting their intelligence or their character? Like so many cult followers, they are but the victim of their own good intentions at the end of the day. And their continued extortion at the hands of its leader(s) are viewed as investments, the down payments for the promised future of abundance. The only evidence of the promised future of abundance is the current state of apparent abundance displayed by the prosperous lives of the leader(s), and how their recollection of hard work and struggle evolved into sacred scriptures. Sprinkled with the if I can do it, you can do it trope. Their divine struggle is always expressed as a bridge for humility to the current have-nots. It’s to keep their journey as relatable as possible no matter how hopelessly unattainable they are for the average follower. 

I was invited via zoom to see one of the leader(s) long and tedious admonitions against working full-time where he droned about the folly of not having a passive income. It was an elaborate decoration of entrepreneurship through an unabridged, unscripted stream of consciousness with a catastrophically stitched-together slideshow that was being narrated with the grace of an adderal-addled teenager’s book report on a book they haven’t actually read but instead browsed passingly over its Wikipedia synopsis. Jumping forward into their story of success to display the modern life of worry-free prosperity, then backwards in time to show they came from a place of struggle, then back again to the present emphasize how selflessly they are for wanting to bestow the fruits of this epic lifestyle to the viewers. It was a truly horrible presentation, unbecoming of any successful person. But, like any good cult leader, the man trucked through the disgrace of a speech with a shimmering confidence only millionaires and sociopaths have. 

There was a period during his stammering where I even pulled out my phone’s stopwatch just to count how many times the guy said ‘like’ or ‘um’ and was astonished by the 16 times in under a minute and a half. My brain was swollen with feelings of distrust for this guy and everything he was saying. Not only from the poor spoken delivery, but in the lack of quality in its visual portrayal and in the conceptual format established for comparing (and belittling) alternative vocations. One would imagine that someone so successful could pay for an appropriate slide show and cue cards or teleprompter to read from. It was obvious this zoom event was shoddily put together and unrehearsed, a perplexing low-effort display from a “successful” person. 

In comedy and in rhetorical speech, there tends to be a rule of 3– 3 examples of something where the last mentioned is the most effective. It’s short, it’s sweet, and it’s easy to digest while keeping the show moving along (see?).  This presentation went into 9 different bitter and outspoken denunciations of modern labor, going so far as shunning the shortcomings of professional trades like plumbing and welding, service industry workers, gig drivers for Uber/Lyft, performing artists, day laborers, nurses, consultants, teachers and social media influencers. The sprinkles on the trash juice ice cream cone of a speech was when he finally initiated the solution or remedy to these shortcomings: His personal pitch for the multi-level marketing business he represents and his promise for delivering sincere mentorship after you invest. His commitment to the cause may or may not be real, but I wasn’t about to trust someone whose entire worth is dependent upon other people investing in his further representation while not actually creating or producing anything himself. His harsh scrutiny and attention to hypocrisy on the other manners of work were conveniently absent when he made sure not to mention how 98% of the people who invest in the company annually fail to break even. But it’s that hyper-successful 2%, which he is allegedly a part of, that are the face of these wannabe TED talks. 

I was skeptical, but the remaining 250 ‘business’ people on the zoom call were hypnotized. Their eyes filled with hope, fascinated at the prospects of exuberant wealth, swayed by the pictures of happiness spilling over onto loved ones, and swooning at the possibilities of all this being an esoteric economic shortcut. 250 people aspiring to finally call themselves entrepreneurs with no exaggeration or adjusted inflection when they telly people. 

I expressed my concerns about the poor quality presentation to my friend, the sweet follower. And like any good follower, she sprung to her leader’s defense. To her, his inadequacy at public speaking was only a testament to the realism of his success. It was precisely because he spoke so poorly that he was rendered more relatable– that even someone without a fancy business degree or communications degree could be a millionaire through this path. Regarding his harping on 9 alternative pathways to success, she empathized that he was simply giving greater attention to detail because his knowledge about their shortcomings was so thorough. And when it came to the inferiority of his slideshow presentation, she simply reminded me that, as a millionaire, he is already so successful in real life that the extra effort on a slideshow was pretty pointless and redundant. Ergo, he is so successful, he no longer has to try. He’s like a Kardashian. 

I didn’t have it in me to bash this idol of hers as a person, though he totally does give off sex-crazed narcissist cult leader energy to me. She admires him... Plus, she appears to get a lot of personal fulfillment from this group as far as socializing and making friends goes, which is probably how he roped her in to begin with. He must have zeroed in on her tiny episodes of vulnerability at one point or another, subtle expressions of her past adversities centered around being an impoverished immigrant and being unable to help her family in times of need, how those experiences may have left an imprint on her, and how to appeal to her deeply entrenched fear of poverty with this fancy marketing pitch.  

Needless to say, I have a lot of opinions about cults, their leaders, and their methods of manipulation. I’ve combated a lot of these personalities throughout life and helped to prevent a fair amount of needless extortion at various times. But I don’t know what to say to my own friend. And the things I could say, the things that are piercing and liberating and true in this case, I feel are just not my place to say it.

What a dilemma to have so much personality and so little influence where it could matter.

Okay Fine Whatever

I looked in a mirror to remember all the things you loved about me but I had to blink twice to manually adjust my lazy eye from its side quest. A symptom of conflicting ideas, one of astonishing greatness worthy of admiration and one of cosmic banality doomed to live its best days in the friendzone at the toxic intersection of unfuckable and irreplaceable. I saw more deeds than features, more of those epic memories and mementos that enhance the idea of a person rather than actually seeing a person them self, and it made me think that maybe I’ve been doing the whole looking in mirrors thing wrong all these years. Instead of rehearsing smiles and analyzing asymmetries, the whole process was a malfunction from the beginning.That’s probably why my eye trails off so willfully. It sees there is nothing here to see. It looks elsewhere hoping for the rest of me to follow. A compass that rebels from the magic of its own magnets. Looking at it in reverse (not unlike a mirror), it’s like I’m learning for the first time why God gave us sight. And maybe that seeing each other was more important than seeing yourself. And maybe being seen actually affects how well it is you see everything else, that even a message being left on ‘seen’ is okay enough to be heard, to be felt. And it’s fine to want to unsee things. Some images are too heavy to love for whatever reason. And some eye balls don't pull their weight.

Just a Little Foundation

What does integrity mean to you? Where do you have it? Where do you not?

Integrity is being true to oneself, the spiritual consistency by being who and what you say you are, uncompromising and absolute with the principles. I have integrity in my work ethic, thoughtful empathy and compassion for others, my commitment to keeping promises, my approach to creating art, in my conversations, and how I express myself to those I love. I do not have integrity when it comes to my commitment to deadlines for creative projects.

What emotions do you feel? What emotions do you rarely feel?

Emotions I feel include joy, gratitude, jubilation, ecstasy, awe, curiosity, grief, sadness, lust, romantic desire, envy, loneliness, ineptitude, hunger, thirst, fatigue, mental irritation, intellectual satisfaction, comedic satisfaction, grace, anger, sorrow, anguish, calmness, and impatience. Emotions that I rarely feel are regret, romantic satisfaction, sexual satisfaction, sadism, masochism, assured, safe, accepted, and understood. 

When do you feel anxious? How does it develop?

I feel anxious when I don't feel prepared for something, that I am lacking in information, experience, or other subjective prerequisites to the point that my lack-of will speak louder than my potential-for in the outcome of something I care about. It comes on by surprise when I feel that I am well-prepared, that I am good enough for something or that I know what I need to know but an unforeseen outcome reveals that I was mistaken. I feel a pressure in my throat and the confidence in my voice breaks as I physically freeze up with uncertainty. I start to question how well I know anything at all or if I've only made it this far on my good charm alone.

What emotions do you not express and why?

I do not express emotions of aggression because I don’t have a lot of experience with it. I’ve always had the gift of gab and have been able to talk my way out of most conflicts or make myself so likable, conflicts don’t arise at all and confrontations are preemptively avoided. Even when I am truly angry, righteously and justifiably angry, I don’t know what the healthiest way to express and satisfy the emotion without being oversimplified by those witnessing it and falsely framing me as an angry person.

What are your talents? Where do you believe they come from?

My talents include being an excellent communicator, listener, writer, creative thinker, thoughtful analyzer, quick witted and funny, giving massages with my hands and/or mouth, seeing symbolism and making conceptual connections between things, interpreting how others feel, developing others, and cooking. I believe they come from my people-pleasing nature, a survival mechanism I developed young from having a people-pleasing mother and an emotionally absent father to funnel the people-pleasing habits towards. I developed a feeling that I wasn’t valuable unless I was useful to people, and so I devoted a lot of my young years learning about others and their unmet needs and what I could do to alleviate them to stay relevant.

What are your flaws? Where do you believe they come from?

My flaws include poor physical self-discipline (Overweight), a lack of relevant knowledge in fashion and automobiles and finance, self-image issues (Body Dysmorphia), anxious attachment issues heir to a range of traumas, inability to ask for help when I need help, and lazy eyes. I believe these flaws have an array of causes. 1) Poor physical self-discipline is rooted in the body dysmorphia in that, since I’ve reconciled to myself at a young age that my body is not ideal and beyond repair, a belief reinforced by the rejection I received from girls, I adapted through compensation by making my personality all the more exciting in ways my body couldn’t. The lack of relevant knowledge is rooted in me not seeing the practical use in learning them, considering my lifestyle had more of an appeal to adventure than an accumulation of assets (prone to change in the future for sure). 2) The anxious attachment issues and inability to ask for help are associated with feelings of rejection from my father growing up (subsequently reinforced by the rejection of girls growing up), as well as betrayal by loved ones, and being ignored by loved ones in times of need. 3) Lazy eyes are purely from dad. 

You’re given a life deciding choice between a mother and her newborn baby, which do you choose and why?

On the surface, I say save the mother because the child is too young to even realize what it’s losing out on, whereas the mother already has foundations on the earth and would be capable of contributing to the greater good in greater amounts in a shorter amount of time… Truth is there’s a lot of variables I would request before answering because my judgment could be influenced either direction depending on the circumstance, such as what the mother’s actual wishes would have been for this scenario, how old the mother is, will the child have a support system without the mother herself, whether or not the child is mine, whether or not the child or mother has a debilitating disease, and whether or not the mother already has other children and how old they were if she did. 

What lesson would you pass down to your son/daughter?

It is more important to love than it is know.

What have you changed about yourself from a young man/woman until now?

I have changed my approach toward pleasing others and seeking approval, my commitment to my own mental health, my ability to have crucial conversations and enforce boundaries when necessary, and obliterating my feelings of FOMO. 

What has been your relation with belief in self over the years?

Growing up it was rather bleak. I saw myself as a vessel for others’ happiness and enjoyment because I felt unworthy of it by default, that if I were to have it in some way it was only a cheap rip-off of the real deal, the wish.com version of fulfillment. I started developing a backbone around 23 years old and have progressively added to my feelings of self-worth to this day, so much to the point that I know I am FAR TOO GOOD for certain people, whom deserve nothing from me but my absence. I know I am worthy and a deserving of the full life.

Where have you failed someone else? Who and why?

I failed a girl I dated 2 years ago named Emily by continuing to date her and further our relationship in certain symbolic ways while halting her from official titles of commitment in others because I was dissatisfied in certain parts of our relationship, particularly her inability to accept boundary requests or embrace bad news without having a meltdown of some sort. I knew about 2 months in that it wasn't compatible, but she was so cool, so sexy, and had such a good heart. I was hoping continued dating would meld our problem solving habits into a place of harmony. But in reality, all it did was postpone the inevitable breakup and make her feel used and insulted by the end of it, for which I felt tremendous guilt. 

What duties do you feel you have?

I feel I have the duty to be real, to be the portal of sincerity and honesty to each person I love and to each moment I exist, rather than to the ideas I have about myself. Everything else I give is extra credit.

Is there anything you miss about yourself?

Yes. I miss my six pack and 2021 savings account.

You have 24 hours left on this planet, what do you do, why?

I wake up early and call everyone I love to say a personalized farewell or leave a thoughtful voicemail, I record and post a farewell video for social media friends expressing what life meant to me and all the things I hope for the future of the world without me, I have an epic brunch with my immediate family to reflect on a life well-lived and discuss funeral arrangements, share an intimate drink and conversation with my best friends and discuss how best to move on from my impending absence from their lives, kiss my cat Chuck Norris 100 times, have some deep meaningful and messy sexy with a woman I am in love with, go for sushi dinner and rolled espresso chocolate chip  ice cream, hit a karaoke bar to sing some of my favorite songs, then dance the rest of the night away before coming home to sleep. 

Where do you feel the need to compensate? Why?

I feel the need to compensate for my physique, both height and width, because I don’t think I am very attractive on the surface since I am a bit overweight and under 6ft tall. I think I am handsome and that I have nice hands, big feet, and a large penis capable of thoroughly satisfying women, but feel they aren’t excited enough when they see me to even get to that point of intimacy with me to trigger desire unless I utilize my personality and charm to make them like me.

How do you want people to see you?

I want people to see me as someone who is attractive, funny, intellectually exciting, and capable of making them feel safe physically and emotionally.

What qualities do you not want people to see?

I don’t want people to see me shirtless or naked, or just plain under dressed, unless I’m certain they already like me. I am extremely mindful when I can and can’t use my personality as a shield from embarrassment. 

When have you felt most inspired, why?

I felt most inspired when I received a Sweet Delivery present from my friend Carrie Jenkins because it was her business that she conceived of and built, a dream of hers that continuously got postponed in favor of helping family members or friends, a dream whose postponement hinged on her self-confidence and affected how she saw it coming into fruition–but she did it. Her sending the present was an act of completion, that the dream was here and she made it happen. She showed me I can, too. 

When were you loneliest?

The loneliest I’ve been was May 2019 where I was devastated by the heartbreak of an unrequited love, someone I loved for a very long time who became intimate with me because I was “safe” but she had no interest in being with me as my partner. This feeling of rejection and loneliness led to a cascade of sexual and emotional rebounds with other women. All of whom also wanted nothing but sex from me, which only magnified the pain.

What have you overcome in your life?

I’ve overcome toxic co-dependencies with friends and family and lovers, the loss of close friends, toxic behavioral trends in the family, generational poverty, a gunshot, bureaucratic character assassination attempts, fear of heights, food poisoning, COVID 19, a psychotic ex, a broken ankle in the Colorado wilderness, reckless drivers around the world, the snowy Alaskan wilderness with no reception, being fired, and being Puerto Rican while unable to speak Spanish. 

What are some patterns in your life? (career, friends, relationships)

Career patterns tend to be service-oriented. I’m very personable and funny, so engagement directly with the public is always a play to my strengths. Everyone I consider a friend is an interesting, storied individual who is committed to doing the right thing and being true to their code of ethics, who aren’t afraid of challenging me and being challenged by me in deep discussions. Relationship trends have been a bit muckier, though they tend to be highlighted with deep trends of passion and cultivating thoughtful foundations, the most intense ones I’ve experienced were often one-sided. Though I yearn for a passionate and obsessive love, the trend I’ve fallen into was falling for emotionally unavailable or emotionally distant lovers who saw me more as a friend or as a servant than as a partner. Some broke the news to me early and respectfully while others entertained the charade and played me. You see, I am a healer at heart so I gravitate to those in pain and ended up being the emotional rebound for them instead of their actual goal in love. It is a trend I have spent A LOT of time in therapy breaking. 

What is your purpose?

To unburden others.

The Myth of the Wise Traveler

It isn’t uncommon to stumble upon the trope of gaining wisdom and an all-around heightened perspective as a product of traveling far and away for some time. One of the most copy-and-pasted quotes people virtue signal with on their Facebook profiles is from Mark Twain, who says “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” See? It covers all the bases. It’s poetic, it rolls off the tongue nicely, it wreaks of a curiosity-driven mind, and implicitly challenges you to travel to test the merits of authenticity. It feels self-explanatory. Yet my experience in aviation working closely alongside fellow flight attendants and commercial pilots, all of whom travel as an essential condition of our earning a living, tells me otherwise. Not that travel is the haven for ignorance, but that there is certainly far more nuance to the experience. This is evidenced by how differently we, as colleagues, register information and form identities around the lifestyle. 

Firstly, the political spectrum across the airlines fall into these radicals: Flight attendants are liberal-leaning and pilots are conservative-leaning, not only in the conventional racial and socioeconomic demographics but also along gender identity and sexual orientation. Across major American airlines, commercial pilots are also overwhelmingly heterosexual white males. On the flip side, the population of us commercial flight attendants, although mostly heterosexual white women, are the largest employment demographic of individuals who identify along the spectrum of the LGBTQ members of society in the worldand is far more racially diverse than the population of commercial pilots. The minority among commercial flight attendants is the inverse, the heterosexual males are fewest and furthest between. Obviously, pilots make a ton more money than flight attendants since their jobs require far more hours of expensive training and the risk/reward ratio to their performance is far higher, which also makes it an incredibly prestigious position to hold. It isn’t like the flight attendant’s job is risk-free either, but the standard day doesn’t require perfection in performance to complete the shift. 

I bring these stereotypes up because one’s identity or personal experience is often used as a reactionary justification for particular positions on social topics– in this case, the value of travel. It isn’t uncommon to hear someone preface their opinion with something along the lines of, “As a working class first generation latin woman and military veteran mother of three I think travel is all about ___.” What is implied is that a person’s identity is a comprehensive confirmer of reality, that their identity itself is a high quality product of ideological or even strategic legitimacy. Claiming membership to a marginalized group is subtly deployed as a tagline to an intrinsic truth which is meant to be accepted without question. Inversely, historically privileged points of view are more often than not dissolved, as if marginalized groups aren’t vulnerable to the same inconsistencies heir to privileged ones. All of us occupying the sacred space of humanity in movement are guilty of being immersed in our own subjective uniqueness. However undercooked we prefer to order our side-dishes of truth when we register information, there is authentic alignment to be found in the art of seeing beyond your own social dispositions. 

When someone tells you they travel for a living it is embedded with the default setting of exploration, that the modus operandi is laced with the spirit of wonder and discovery. And for many of us that’s exactly what it is. Every flight is an adventure, subtly different for every person on the aircraft, and every pilot and flight attendant is some degree of a tour guide. But going on an adventure isn’t exactly glued to the accumulation of wisdom and not every tour guide has their heart of hearts in the journey. The aviation industry, like any industry that offers more benefits than people know what to do with, is also home to its own sinister subculture for agents of ignorance. As much as travel is a liberator it also provides a haven for the worst people imaginable, the likable sociopaths and convenient narcissists, the dregs of the society who are well-traveled and well-spoken and well-connected. The true pollution of the skies. These are folks who live life on the run, who stay in the skies or in foreign destinations specifically to avoid the circumstances at home. They’ve allowed the travel lifestyle itself to become their personality. 

Veiled by benefits—the benefit of $0 flights on any airline in particular—they get to avoid confrontations and conflict altogether by simply always being someplace else. Ducking lovers they are unfaithful to, evading the responsibilities of parenthood, endlessly postponing unfinished conversations, promoting the powerful illusion of lavish lifestyles and worldly insight in order to appear more interesting than they truly are, all unaddressed due to the the guise of being too busy flying or being too jet lagged to address reality when they aren’t flying. Some of them take it even further in how they implement the use of fake names, fake backstories, and otherwise completely fabricated personalities suitable for them on the go in foreign cities. It affords them a barrier of mystique that is easy to weaponize into a charming character template to roleplay as. And who could deny its usefulness in most social situations? On the surface, a consequence-free lifestyle with comfortable access to tropical getaways and drastically magnified social circles that transcend state lines does pitch as a huge asset. And perhaps it is in the right person’s hands… but it’s not a life welling with wisdom.

No one so distracted has the time to expand in wisdom. They’re too busy to notice the subtlety and depth of higher truths granted by greater exposure to the world and its people. Too busy cataloging the price of everything to appreciate the value in anything they have. Too fixated on where they’ve been and where they’re going next to ever waste time being where they are, being in the moment. So otherwise plagued by the myths of their own magnificence, they are hubris personified. The unwise, but totally active. Thankfully, they are also few and far between.

I mean this in the least poetic way possible: Just because you travel a lot doesn’t mean you’ve actually gone anywhere. It’s the difference between witnessing the world and engaging with the world. Between getting wet and feeling the water. It suffices to say that it is nothing short of a cosmic banality for you to notice other people’s shoes but be unable to imagine yourself walking in them, to feel their truth as they feel it. Humans are explorers at heart after all. We’ve evolved to walk, run, swim, and even engineered ways to sail and fly. But when there’s no place else to go, our souls must continue the great search.

But hey, I get it. Not everybody travels to gain wisdom anyways. Some of us have enough shit going on that we just need a break from where we are and there’s no shame in that. Nothing wrong with noticing other people’s shoes if you just like shoes. But don’t say you’re wiser because of it. Before any steps are even physically taken, before tickets are purchased or any doors are actually opened, the ability to step outside of yourself is where travel actually begins. 

Helpful Amnesia

The light chill and soft rain tap dancing on the coffee shop window signaled that this is supposed to be the quiet part. The sequence where little to no input is required. My least favorite part of unemployment to be honest. Sitting back and being the observer with no clear instructions on what exactly needs to be observed or for how long. Just waiting.

The coffee is too hot to sip so the seconds are stretched by pretending to read a book but actually reading the people at other tables. The guy in the lamp-lit corner is an artist, without a doubt. He is sitting by himself at a table that seats four, the tattered sweatpants along with the mop of curly brown hair gently drizzling dandruff into his coffee cup was enough to know he wasn't waiting for anyone else, but was typing into his phone like his fingers are competing in a game of Dance Dance Revolution. Coked up on caffeine and an everything bagel, he was hard at work.  You could vaguely hear the phone blaring with the first parts of an alarm-sound before being muted by his instantaneous typing so, at the very least, there was someone he was avoiding talking to, which somehow made him more respectable. The occasional audible "Oh shit! That's so true," laced with a satisfied grin gave the clue that he was also impressed with the pictures he was viewing. There was no stopping the thoughts from flowing. Even if he wasn't writing poetry, there was something deeply poetic about him in this episode of tectonic texting. He was the embodiment of distraction. 

The server walked over, a gentle ginger with the same hairstyle but tangerine in tone and smooth cheeks spangled with freckles instead of dandruff, and replaced his snowy mug with a fresh cup of steamy black coffee. He didn't bat an eye, not even to thank her. It was equal parts ignoring calls and sharing memes online, an intricate silhouette of staying engaged while totally avoiding engagement. It was a magical anti-dynamic to witness in real time, a waltz between worlds, seeing a person dance openly with the shadows of his own absence. Not a bad way to keep the adventure alive. This, too, was totally meme-worthy.

With nothing better to do, I reach for my phone with all intention of taking a picture of this random guy to embroider the moment with something clever sprawled across the bottom like, 'Mondays be like' or '#Mood' or 'Tell us you're single without telling us you're single,' for some relatable laughter to post on Instagram later on but felt nothing but napkins and crumbs on the side of the table. The phone wasn't there. It wasn't in any pockets or atop any nearby shelves or in a puddle outside on the sidewalk because it was still on the bed charging at home. Forgotten but not lost. While the Google Pixel 4 is unable to help in the extorting of someone else's moment, it is guilty of assuring the coffee eventually gets cool enough to sip at least one table in this unnamed cafe. 

Some say the universe itself speaks through coincidence, and sometimes it tells you gently, with a considerate cosmic whisper, "Don't be an asshole."