Now, With Wings:

The first cup barely hits the sides, these days.  It’s the second cup that provides the little kick that gets me into the afternoon. This one contains 3.9mg of caffeine, brewed to 93 degrees.  Food is an afterthought, in this most excellent coffee shop. The chain is called Clarence’s.  Not all of them are this good. Their slogan is ‘No-one is a failure with coffee!’

Through the huge, plate glass windows, I’m watching people, traffic going by.  It’s almost like a lens on a pensioner’s glasses, it obscures real life, in a way. 

Whatever real life is, these days.  

The couple at the nearest table are in love, I can see that much immediately.  They are fated, meant to be together.  Not that it ever played out that way.  She’s preening her hair, as she speaks.  When he speaks, he uses his hands a lot.  A hand gesture is almost avian, to the untrained eye.  

The steam is leaving my second cup.  The quirky cover version of a Bob Dylan song plays, for both the first time today and the twenty-eighth time this week.  The young kid who clears the tables hovers, looking to clear the crockery that’s already piling up on the table.  I wave him away, firmly but politely.  

He’s only doing his job, poor lamb. He’s doing this, to pay his way through college.  Later in life, I can see him making some important, scientific discovery?  Ok, he’s looking at a test tube, unblinkingly.  

Global Warming?  Cold Fusion? Cancer? Not sure. It’ll come to me. 

I look up again and see another couple.  Slightly older.  A little bit happier. Some imperceptible change has taken place.  Less touching, but these are longer, more meaningful stares.  Caught in the slipstream of those, are the fragments of smaller, human lives and the rise and fall of empires.  It’s like a reverse earthquake; something is shifting, whilst something is remaining the same.  

Maybe it’s me.  I am the centre of this liquid, wooden universe, after all.  OK, so maybe that’s a little supercilious.  But if you ever felt what I could feel, how would you describe it?  

Their table is now surrounded by children, at least four of them.  I can see glimpses of their futures.  Maybe another cup, another time; it would be simplicity itself to do this.  This, however, is not the time.  This couple - for whatever reason - are the focus.  Personally, I don’t know the reason for this.  

As I always say, not in my air force.  The children have faded away, the numbers and faces of them are unimportant.  I focus again.  

I look up again and another couple are there.  Slightly older.  You can notice the fading light from the eyes, a little.  Maybe next time (it’s always next time, isn’t it?) I’ll bring some sort of gadget or doobrie to measure that.  Human lives are short.  Brutally, criminally short.  But they pack a lot in, you can give them that.  

These two, I’m afraid aren’t going to change the world (like the lad clearing the tables.  Cure for Cancer, that’s it) alter another person’s perceptions of what it means to be human.  That’s an oxymoron if ever there was one.  These two are just punctuation.  

Another cup.  

You can see the physical changes now, some sort of loss of elasticity in the soul, never mind the skin.  I feel almost sorry for them, in a way.  To place someone into the stream of eternity, like a paper boat in a storm is a cruel experiment.  These two have loved each other, became parents, lost parents, became grandparents: in a world where once upon a lie there was death outside the windows, in another human’s touch.  

How do their tiny, fragile, cardboard souls live through these events? How do they crumple and come alive in rotation? They dreamed different dreams, once upon a soul.  They decided to share each other’s dreams.  And look where it gets them.  Every day a tiny death.  

They are fading away as I leave.  It’s almost as if they were never there in the first place.  It’s weird watching that, like smoke hanging in the air after a ceremony.  Once that scent, that delicious twist of chemicals has gone; what is left?  Mere memories.  

I’m walking down the road as it hits me (the thought, not the road): who would be human?  Not me, but they don’t have any choice in the matter.  I’ll see the process repeated; with more success, less pain, but with the same effect.  

Same again tomorrow?