Falling In Love In A Coffee Shop

**Wrote this some months ago, never posted it, and just now realized that for the first time since starting this blog I haven't posted in not just one but like three months. Not cool. So here, it's Fiction Wednesday! Also, hopefully I'll be posting a lot more in the near future, especially with break coming up. Forgive me- I've been giving tumblr all my attention.**


We're sitting drinking coffee. That's a romantic thing to say but we're not actually drinking coffee because you're in a hurry and I'm on a caffeine fast. But we're in the coffee shop, as if we're drinking coffee, almost as if we're on a date you and me. That sounds romantic too. Like that Landon Pigg song, Falling in Love in a Coffee Shop. I want all of my first loves, my first falls, to take place in this coffee shop, over the strains of The Civil Wars or Elliott Smith. I want your eyes meeting mine with The xx playing, want my heart beating faster in time with PJ Harvey, want Cat Power to stir in your belly and the whispers of Bon Iver or Jason Mraz to make your hand creep toward mine almost unconsciously, almost out of your own control.

But we're not falling in love in a coffee shop, are we, we're not even drinking coffee because you're in a hurry and I'm on a caffeine fast.

This is an interview, by the way. I write for the newspaper, you're a musician, and somehow God planted a seed in the head of my editor and for once she did something brilliant and assigned me to write an article about you.

You tell me you think that you're talking too much and I smile. I don't tell you that I'm asking too many questions, questions I don't need to ask you, questions that aren't relevant to this interview at all. I just can't help myself; the opportunity to explore you has been thrust at me, demanded of me really. I'm only human, you know. What kind of individual would I be if I passed this up?

The interview lasts longer than it should and I stare at your eyes longer than I should and you are so full of passion when you talk that I wonder how the other conversations full of inantities and trivialities, like finding the "one" and frustrations at work can even continue in the wake of your words. Your words are so powerful, you are giving a speech, what do any of these other people have any business doing talking while you're talking. How can they not be swept away just as much as I am? Their caucus laughter, the sound of their obscene ringtones, their overzealous laughter, I find vaguely infuriating.

Shut up. I am trying to fall in love in a coffee shop.

But we're not falling in love in a coffee shop, are we, we're not even drinking coffee because you're in a hurry and I'm on a caffeine fast.

My precious half hour with you is up now and I give you the dismissal to leave. But you pause a few moments, asking me about class, how do I like the book we're reading, what do I think of the professor; his teaching style is really relaxed, we're all slacking off quite a bit, which feels guilty but it doesn't matter much because he doesn't seem to care. He'd really be better off sticking to writing to poetry than teaching, you say, and I smile because you don't even know how many times I have said that before, to people who don't understand, not the way you do.

And then finally, you stand up, you're leaving, you're so tall, you're so lovely, don't leave me. You're in a hurry, I knew that from the start, you have to go to work now. But if you stayed, if you stayed behind and talked with me, maybe we could fall in love in a coffee shop.

You walk out of the door and I take a sip of my tea: chamomile, I don't like the Italian brand but it's all that this coffee shop has and the chamomile was necessary to calm my stomach.

I turn around and see long chestnut hair, ruddy cheeks, a head bent over intensively to text books. I know this girl. I've seen her before. All last year, she was on your arm, and she wore dresses and the two of you smiled and ate fruit together. She was your love and now she has seen us, here, and perhaps she thinks we are falling in love in a coffee shop, and perhaps she feels pain, perhaps she feels jealousy, perhaps she doesn't care but she must, I can't see how she couldn't.

I feel overwhelmed for her. I feel sad.

I wonder what it was like for her, when you sat her down and told her things couldn't keep on this way.

I wonder what it was like for her the first time you held her hand or the first time she knew that she was the only person dancing around in your head.

I wonder if the two of you fell in love in a coffeeshop.

I feel an intruder, and I want to hug her and give her some of my tea but I can't. I can't because I like you and she's a girl and so she can tell by the way that I laughed at your jokes and tried to meet your eyes as often as I could and clung to your words like they were diamond and gold and pearls, jewels dropping from your perfectly-formed lips.

And so, we can never be friends, her and I, and that's sad and I sigh. We can never be friends. Because of the coffee shop and how this is the place where people fall in love.

Fiction Friday Vol. II

Blogging from Wheaton College in Mass right now folks. That's right, I'm at Wheaton, partying it up college kid style, and I still had the love and consideration to write you a post. Actually I've had this particular Fiction Friday waiting around for a few days to post until Friday came around but shh don't tell anyone that. Right now I just look like a really awesome blogger. (To be fair, it was a struggle and a half to get the stupid internet here to work and finally I just resorted to posting from my best friend's computer.) So here it is! Enjoy! Sorry that not nearly a generous enough amount of editing was done.






 Disillusionment and Sofia Vergara


He. His name is Jonas and he sits across from me in a cafeteria booth- the same cafeteria booth, but I don't tell him that. His eyes are ice blue shards that glint in the sunlight streaming across his crooked face. His face that is always half-shadowed, as if some mysterious, dark presence has settled and made its home there.

His long fingers tease at the burnt edges of a sesame-seed bagel: toasted, but dry, as he tells me how he lost his faith. He speaks of it as though it is a tangible thing, like a locket, something he held in his hand and felt the cool smooth weight of, until one day, he just lost it.

He was in high school at the time. He is not looking at me when he says this, rather looking out the window, and the unflinching sunlight bathing his figure feels garish at a time like this. This is serious. This is somber. The shadows on Jonas' face are darker than usual. And the stupid dumbass sun keeps shining in, intruding on this moment. Such a romantic moment, I think shallowly. Bon Iver ought to be playing in the background.

He took some classes at the local college. Most of the kids in his high school did; it was encouraged. This is when he lost the locket- his faith I mean.

It just didn't make sense anymore, he is saying to me, and his skinny fingers move to circling the rim of his half-empty orange juice glass. My faith- I realized that my faith was a sham. It was just ignorance.

And it was frightening. He has not said that part, not so explicitly, but I can see it on the shadows on his face, in the flickering of his eyes. It was frightening the first time he realized it might not all be true. I know this without him actually verbalizing it. I have been there before.

It was when I told my parents I was bisexual, and in doing that, renounced everything they had ever taught me, everything I had ever known. In their eyes, you couldn't be bisexual and still have a piece of their faith. It wasn't possible. I knew that being bisexual meant that I couldn't hold onto my faith anymore. I still believed in God. That was a knowledge that had been inescapably ingrained in my brain since infancy. But faith- faith was something I couldn't cling to anymore. I ran away. I had to run away.

Jonas is talking now, about how glad he is. I'm glad I know though. He makes sure that my eyes are hitched with his eyes while he says this. As sad as it is, to realize everything you believed was a lie, it's better to know. I'd rather know. And I still believe in God, you know. Maybe someday, I'll come back to it all. But for now, I'm glad I know.

He drains the cup of orange juice.

I agree with what he has said. It is sad. He feels that he has won something with his knowledge, but really, I think that he has lost. I think this for a brief moment, before I am distracted by the sesame seed that has found its way to his outer lip. I want to lean forward and lick it off, or perhaps remove it with my teeth, so carefully, barely grazing their hard shellacked edges with the softness of his skin.

He sees my gaze then and smiles, softly. Perhaps he knows, knows how much his disillusionment has enchanted me. I am a writer; I can't help but be drawn to his woundedness, his brokenness. His brooding, dark, mysteriously veiled face. I want to help him. But I can't because I don't have the answers myself.

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Jonas told me once that he thought Sofia Vergara was beautiful. He said it in a mild way, offhandedly. He was not graphic, did not go into the details about what he would like to do to her, if he could get with her. He just said she was beautiful. He liked the way she looked.

It made my heart ache in that way it always does when someone I think is beautiful talks about how beautiful someone else is. In that moment, the only thing I wanted in the whole entire world was to be Sofia Vergara. And wasn't that a stupid thought. If I was Sofia Vergara, I would not be here. I would not even know Jonas. The type of men that I could have- well that's just it, they would be men, not disillusioned boys, not like Jonas. I would be far and away from this place. I would not be scared. I would have a grip on my life. I would not be so desperately enamored of this sad little boy with his deep voice and daring dispassion. And I would have that idiotic accent. That woman has some body, but man I hate her accent.

I told him that, when he said how much he liked Sofia. I told him her accent was dumb. He smiled at that, and my heart warmed, though I had ordered it not to. But I can't help it when it comes to Jonas. Little pieces of my heart warm at all the things he does. At the way his voice is so much deeper than you would expect it to be and at the way he seems all apathetic about everything in the world but he's still really smart and he works hard and gets good grades in school, and most especially- it warms at the way he smiles at something I've said, even if his smile is making fun of me, like it is now.

You're just jealous he says, and he's completely right and I hate him for that. You shouldn't worry about it. You look just fine. Tabitha.

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My good friend Sarah, who is older and wiser than I am, once told me that I was a lovely girl. You're beautiful, Tabby. Beautiful Tabitha. He had told it to me too, when we were in the booth, touching each other quietly, brokenly. The same booth where Jonas and I had talked about the missing faith. I had touched another boy there, a lonely boy, and he had told me I was beautiful.

But beautiful is a subjective thing. I didn't tell that to him, not in the booth. It wasn't the time for arguments. But I told it to Sarah, because it was true and she knew it and she smiled at me and dropped into my hands a piece of her wisdom.

You are beautiful, and I don't think anyone could miss it. But it's a special kind of beauty. You're beautiful to those who are young. The young, the broken and the disillusioned. They can see the beauty in you, in your rebellion, in the way that you run.

I just wanted Jonas to see the beauty in me, and I told Sarah that.

He does, I think. Jonas knows you're beautiful. He sees that. But you're not- and don't take offense to this Tabitha- you're not the right kind of beautiful. You're the kind of beautiful that he wants to touch, that he wants to feel pressed up against him. You have the beauty whose hips he wants to encircle, whose legs he wants to graze, whose breasts he wants to bury his heartbroken face in. Your lips, your soft hair: this is the beauty that is a balm to his disillusioned soul. You could heal him right now. Your beauty could be what he needs, to find the beauty in everything else again, to find the beauty in the whole, not just the part, to find the beauty in the world. You are a beauty for now, and a beauty for here, and a beauty for this.  But you aren't the type of beautiful that he's going to remain enchanted by forever. You aren't- you aren't the type of beautiful he's going to want to take home to mother.


That's fine. I don't want to meet Jonas' mother. Sarah's words don't hurt me, no, they make a lot of sense, really they do. I'm not the girl he brings home to mother. And by he I mean any he. Not just Jonas but all of them, all of the hes in the world he might be enchanted by my beauty. My beauty that exists in my uncertainty, in my rebellion, in my running away.

Jonas is running from God, and that is why my beauty enchants him. That is why my beauty is not something his mother would see, is not something he could share with her, or share for a lifetime. Once he finds God again, and I hope that he will, my beauty will fade into the background of a pure, golden-haired virgin. Home-schooled probably. Never said the f-word in her whole damn life.

But, but, but,

Can't they see this? Can't they see it here, on my face, in my eyes, in my voice that is no longer so afraid?

I am not running anymore.

Fiction Friday V. 1

This is my first official Fiction Friday post, the first of what I hope will be many more to come.

I have to apologize for two things. One, I'm not posting this on Friday. I'm actually posting it on Saturday afternoon. But I am not one to be a legalist, by any means. And in my defense, I did have this written on Thursday night actually, but what can I say, it's been an exhausting week for so many reasons, not the least of which being I am working twice as much as I was last semester and it eats up a lot of my evenings. So I'm getting this to you, belatedly, and I'm sorry about it but not really that sorry. The second thing I'm (half-heartedly, because if I really cared I would fix it) apologizing for is that this is not my best quality. I like the idea but I know it could use a lot of editing and cutting down. But I never promised that Fiction Fridays would be super high-quality final draft kind of work. So here it is, as it is. Sorry sorry and enjoy:

In Love with In Love

I don’t remember when we met: people have told me we were five, naked in somebody’s backyard sandbox at a Sunday School barbecue. I wonder if, even as little kids, you had already started looking at me the way you do now, that way that makes me feel like I might do something scandalous: get up in the middle of Sunday morning service and do cartwheels between the pews, and you would laugh and it would make you love me all the more. You find me whimsical, enchanting, and it isn’t egotistical of me to say this, it’s just that I can tell, from the look that you have in your green-gray-blue eyes. I know that I scare you sometimes, but I think you love me all the more for that.

Then, when we were twelve, around twelve anyway, your parents invited mine down to your Saquish beach house to eat hamburgers and play pickle on the sea grass. Us kids rode tumbled together in your daddy’s truck bed, tucked under a blanket so the police wouldn’t see and get mad. We were comrades then, hiding together from any who might seek to separate us. But then, on the beach, in our adolescent swimsuits, you and your brother threw clumps of seaweed at my sister and me, and I tried to throw some back, but my throw wasn’t very strong and they always fell short of where you stood, so cocky and confident, and you laughed.

When we got older you apologized, real shame-faced and reticent, as if I was really going to hold you responsible for teasing me when we were twelve. I smiled and said it was fine and I saw relief slump into your narrow shoulders and your eyes follow the way my teeth bit at my bottom lip, nervous and flirtatious all at once.

You told me I was demure once, and I gave you a hard time about it, and you shrunk back into your shell immediately, trying to modify the statement, admitting you supposed you couldn’t really say, you didn’t propose to know me that intimately, after all.

After church you’d linger with me in the foyer, the smell of coffee and musty choir robes, dusty Bibles comfortably wrapped around us, pushing us together and sometimes the chatter of the mingling congregation would get so loud, you’d have to lean in real close to hear me and I could see the blonde stubble on your chin.

When we went away to school, you brought those conversations with you: you’d email me and I’d send replies, long and detailed and complicated, because I never could manage to make my writing very succinct.

I don’t know what you ever saw in me. You were always so good, always so content and quiet and thoughtful and happy to do your Bible reading and happy to wear ironed, laundered button ups to church, and happy to clean you room, and happy to wake up earlier than seven o’clock in the morning. I was the girl that got the tattoos and had a Mohawk that one year in high school and wore ostentatious clothing and unabashedly questioned things we really shouldn’t question. I was wild, flyaway, self-conscious, annoying, fickle. I was the color red: sometimes dark and intense and moody, other times bright and cheerful and lovely.

I don’t know, now, if I’m really in love with you. We were engaged last summer under the poplar tree with the swing in your cousin’s backyard and part of me wasn’t surprised, part of me felt like this was expected, maybe almost like I had done it before, like it was a dream and I was only living it out again, in real life. And part of me couldn’t help but wonder, though it felt natural, did it feel right?

You hold my hand now- that’s the farthest you’ll go with me physically- almost nervously you inch your long, cold fingers toward mine and I feel almost repulsed at times, at times it takes everything I have in me not to slap that cold, tentative hand away. But then I remember the way you were when we were kids on the beach, brutally teasing and rough and unapologetic, and it gives me hope, that the twelve-year-old seaweed thrower might still be there somewhere inside, that he might show his face again one day, that someday, if I stick by you, I will coax him out again.

I lie awake at night sometimes and wonder if I am actually in love with you or really just in love with the way that you are in love with me.

Fiction Fridays

Guess what guys! I am really super very excited to announce that this blog will be hosting a new feature! I know! Who would've thunk it! I'm not really a "feature" type of girl.

I've had a plethora of blogs in the past, ones that I've created and used and then deleted or created and never used and then deleted, and as of now, I think three are in existence and two are updated regularly. My tumblr: is the blog that I kind of just use for fun, for personal things or random things or pretty and exciting things that I want to post whenever. This blog, when I began it, was meant to be a place for me to post completed works of fiction that I wrote.

As it was, I wrote more, I think I once termed them "impassioned diatribes" than works of fiction, hence the name shift and, on the whole, a kind of purpose shift for the blog. But I don't want to stop posting fiction altogether, as that was kind of my original purpose, and it is, ultimately, what I most enjoy writing and the place I hope to eventually take my writing, in terms of a career and my life focus, etc.

So with that being said, I present to you Fiction Fridays. Now that my fiction class has ended, I have no reason to be writing fiction on a regular basis anymore, and that's not good, because that means that I won't. I just won't do it. And I need to be doing it. So to keep me writing fiction and to maybe make my blog a bit more fun and interesting? (maybe not) I'm going to have Fiction Fridays, at least once, maybe twice a month. These are Fridays on which I will be posting strictly works of fiction. I have no guidelines for the types or lengths or quality of fiction at the present. I'm also going to set the goal of just getting at least one Fiction Friday a month for now, and we'll see how that goes. For whatever reason, I seem to do a lot better at posting regularly when I'm actually at school, so that seems to indicate I will still be able to do my regular weekly post as well as a Fiction Friday on the week that the two coincide, but once again, no promises. We'll see what happens with it, where it goes. For now, I'm going to try it out and hopefully, it's not a complete flop! I hope you're looking forward to it! (Maybe. Kinda. Ok. Shut up.)