It doesn’t take much to sit all alone at a counter, but try it when your gal at home just handed you the relationship check and you end up walking all night, end up at one of those big-windowed diners where anyone passing by can look in, only no one does, and it’s two a.m. and you order the coffee that lies mud-dead on your tongue and the couple at the other end of the counter seem to be screaming their twoness at you, only you take a closer look at how she is pretty enough, a red dress all come-on to anyone looking, only no one does, not the man behind the counter, folded into chores, and not the man who is next to her, he isn’t looking and you know what that means, having just left your gal who hadn’t looked at you for how long now, and now that you do know you will do everything different and the open eyes of the windows across the street can see all of this in the ways only windows can, being filled all the time with the world coming in and out of them as it does, and you wish there were some quiet way to do this, to take this red-dress woman who is scanning the counter for what she doesn’t even know, and the least you can do is maybe strike up a conversation, something about coffee or how blue the streets look what with winter coming on, keep going, keep going until you see her eyes looking up, locking with yours, across that cornfield of a man she is stuck with, and you know that the most you can hope for is a spark, but that’s how wildfires start, one flick of light, then another, and who knows the route of a fire anymore than who knows the route of love, and what could begin right there in the whitened night could be something anyone would want to see.
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