central nervous system

When we first met, he told me that he liked large breasted women and that on his way to see me he walked past a child squatting a meter from a high end concept store, his parents whistling him on as a pool of urine slowly coated the pavement around him. “what the fu- I mean, welcome to TST”, I said in a soft voice, while he was already firing questions at me consecutively, without waiting for the actual response.

I was there to write and eat cauliflower soup, it was one of those ‘always-a-buzz’ places, one you definitely avoid if you hate life. He had short frizzy hair that felt like the rough green side of a sponge, the ticklish kind, and his skin could best be described as ‘free from hardship or troubles or fried food’. Except for the dark circles surrounding his eyes. Really big and really sunken. I could tell he had trouble sleeping, though he never seemed to be dozing off.

He talked for minutes on end, while outside’s blistering heat was creeping through the door left ajar. He wasn’t annoying or anything, and he seemed to have been waiting for someone to just sit there and listen. My remarks were scarce and usually followed by a quietness that seemed to bother him for a few seconds, the time it took him to blurt out another shot of nonsensical comments.

I was fiddling with my spoon, the soup already cold, when a sudden halt came into the conversation. His face changed, as if right at that moment he realized where he was. He started sniffing the stale, pungent hot air. “There are scents here that can penetrate to your imagination”, he said. “Some I can only describe as, ‘WHUT’.”

“So much of the city is our bodies with their neverending smells”, I said looking out of the window. “Even the city carries ruins in its heart. Places that no longer exist but are full of feeling. Like phantom limbs. Like in that Stephen King novel, Duma Key. Few buildings, few lives are built so well even their ruins are beautiful.”

Like a room with the air suddenly sucked out, he paused his breathing and looked at me. I held his stare unable to read his eyes, seemingly wandering in mine. We sat in silence for a long time after, minds wandering.

Later, while in a taxi with some friends, without kissing or knowing me, he says ‘I love you’.

‘It’s just literature though’, I respond a few minutes later, as if I knew him. As if I was sure that had to be the correct answer. As if what he had said had come carrying a phantom question mark at the end.

A few months pass and he really, actually, truly falls in love with another girl, and she falls in love with him too. Every now and then I think about them, like today.

Not that I know them well, to me they are just names on a piece of paper, no graphs, no illustrations, no stories for me to read. But they fell in love in an interesting place and lead a- if not interesting, at least not mediocre- life.

I guess that’s what I’m thinking about today, a ‘not mediocre’ life. And literature.