Two Seconds at the Coffee Cart

September sixth.

She said something. That is the whole story, really, except that it isn't.

We were both at the coffee cart before the Thursday shift, the one where you hand a dollar fifty to a man named Terrence who has been there longer than most of the staff and who does not make small talk, which I respect, and she was behind me in line and she said, in the particular dry tone she has when she's not trying to be funny but is, that she had read something lately that made her think about whether people know when they're being written about. And then she took her cup. And I took mine. And we walked in.

I had approximately two seconds. Maybe less. Two seconds to decide whether I was the kind of person who would say oh, is that so, tell me more, or the kind of person who lets a thing land and then keeps moving. I kept moving. I said something back about how that sounded like either a good thing or a bad thing depending on the writing, and she laughed a little, and that was it. We went to our respective stations and I took table five and she took the back section and the shift happened the way shifts happen.

The coffee cart. Where it happened.

I have been sitting with it since. Not in a bad way. In a way that feels like I made a choice and now I have to figure out what the choice means. She might have been talking about a novel. She might have been talking about something on the internet that had nothing to do with me. She might have been talking about exactly what I think she was talking about, and she gave me the off-ramp on purpose, the way you do when you want someone to know without making them say it out loud.

Walking it off.

I picked the off-ramp. I don't know if that was the right call or the cowardly one. Probably both. The coffee was good, though. Terrence always gets it right.