9.15

[it just occurred to me that I have no idea what day it is, actually]

The glue stuck to his fingers in long, stringy bits that pulled at his skin and rolled into tubes of adhesive that wouldn't come off no matter how hard he flicked his fingers against each other because the now-taut, now-relaxed oozes of synthetic syrup were dragging at the grooves of his long artist's fingers and refusing to let go, like the girl at the next table who was on the phone trying to not be broken up with by her boyfriend who probably wasn't worth saving because he tried to break up with her over the phone while she was in class, never considering that it made him a coward and a fool, but instead just rushing on into life without the focus needed to make a proper sculpture out of strips of balsa wood carved to an exact shape and glued together in layers to make a perfect human face, complete with imperfections and asymmetry and enough glue to spill out of the edges onto the artists fingers and stay there, slimy and gooey until it dried enough to pull at the skin and stick no matter how hard the fingers flicked to get them off.

He turned to the girl next to him, determined to ask why she tried to stay with a man who was unman enough to break up with a girl over the phone, but he lost his nerve when he saw the tears in her eyes and sheepishly asked for a towel instead, using it to clean the glue off his too-tacky fingers, running the feel of the cloth deep between his thumb and forefinger and feeling the grain of it rub against the crease of flesh there until the girl looked back at him, wondering what was taking him so long, and why he refused to turn away from her despite the obvious tears rolling down her smooth, curving cheeks like the breakers on a beach that entices people from all over the world with its exotic black sands that promise to highlight the effect of light on water on sand like a tear rolling over wet black skin so it catches the light and refracts prism-like a tiny rainbow into the face of anyone standing just so, and when he saw it he about choked, for the artist in him almost died at the vision of something he could never paint no matter how many colors he was given, something he could never sculpt, no matter what material he gathered, something he wouldn't be able to capture in words even with the help of all the poets in the world, something so beautiful it took away the breath of a man who had seen more than his share of art.

That tear, the reflector and refractor of what seemed like an infinite amount of light in an infinite amount of time, rolling down her cheek, picked up speed and headed for her chin where it hovered, waiting, patient for a time, to fall from her quivering jaw to the front of her shirt to join the rest of the tears she cried that day for the good-for-nothing fool on the other end of a long telephone line, despite there being a plethora of available men, not limited to potentially attractive ones with glue on their fingers.

He coughed and handed her the rag.
"Thank you."

Maybe tomorrow.