The Sentence That Wasn't Mine

October twentieth.

There was a couple in the corner booth. I say couple because that seemed right, the body language, the specific way one of them kept looking at the table instead of at the other person. I wasn't trying to watch. I was waiting for my order and the line was longer than expected and I had nothing to do with my eyes except rest them somewhere.

I didn't hear most of it. The espresso machine ate everything except one sentence, which landed clean and clear in a gap between steaming cycles: that's just what I assumed you wanted. And then silence. Not angry silence, I don't think. The kind that means something is being decided.

I got my coffee. I took it to a small table by the window and I sat there for another twenty minutes, not reading, not on my phone, just, sitting with it. I don't know what they were talking about. I don't know if it ended well or badly or somewhere in between. But that sentence has been following me around since Saturday afternoon and I keep turning it over. That's just what I assumed you wanted. How many things in my life am I running on assumptions that nobody said out loud? It is a very October kind of question to be asking.

The light through those windows was doing something nice, for the record. The afternoon eventually got away from me in the best way, I think I stayed nearly an hour. I needed it more than I knew.

the mug. the afternoon. the wandering attention.

watching without meaning to. october does that.