telling time

The barista forgets my order and a guy wearing a white tank and red shorts walks out of the café bathroom with a fresh joint between his lips. Candy canes, I think on, an inside thought, candy canes on fire. Outside, air is cooling. Soon it will be winter. Candy Cane Man seems my age, a bit older, twenty-eight, maybe twenty-nine, and he has a birthmark on his nose, curly hair, a sling bag slung over a shoulder. YO, someone growls. The place plays resonant songs with lyrics that equate to noun-verbs like LOVE to terrible drugs. The music my ex used to play. I only have the one ex and am not in the market to collect another. Not even when Candy Cane Man stares at me, which makes my face flush, makes my stomach do a front flip. People, I believe, are not disposable, not to be used or forgotten. I FORGOT WHAT YOU ORDERED, the barista says to me real quiet, bashful as a baby. I tell him, A LATTE WITH REGULAR MILK, which feels very metropolitan and New Yorkish. We don’t say WHOLE MILK here. We say: I’M WALKIN’ DOWN THE STREET. We say: I’M TAKING THE TRAIN UPTOWN. We say: I LIVE IN THE EAST VILLAGE, not: I LIVE IN EAST VILLAGE. Articles are inserted, remembered, cherished as members of complete sentences. THE, AN, AND; I get my little latte and I sit in a little chair and I should have worn a sweater. I never wear a sweater when I need one. Fall is a temperamental season. I miss fall elsewhere. Elsewhere, like in England, they call the fall the AUTUMN. I once saw a grey-haired lady trip over a concrete crack and smack the ground with her face. There was blood, and I didn’t know what to do because other people, strangers, were already doing things, like kneeling on the concrete and sliding back on her leather driving shoes and pressing wet cloths to her nose, her eyes, her cheeks. Joint pain develops as a side-effect of age. Skin thins with age. Age drives the introspective to reflect. I reflect; I am reflecting. One of the café walls is a mirror. I am so young, and so is Candy Cane Man, outside now, smoking his joint. I want to join him. Perhaps this is why people call marijuana cigarettes JOINTS; that lovely soft drug joins people together. Strangers say the strangest things. I have heard strangers say we FALL INTO LOVE because love hurts us so, as though LOVE were something concrete. Internet search: WHAT WAS THE ORIGINAL FALL FROM GRACE? If Eve had a bag, would she have stored apples inside and made Adam lug the heavy thing out of that garden? My roommate and I are thinking of cultivating a garden on our fire escape. We could plant cabbage. But no, we cannot because, soon, all good living things will wilt away for a short measure of time. In time, my coffee is half-drunk and, I confess, I haven’t been drunk for a while. Maybe since summer, but I’m not sure. I’m not sure when that season ended. I am sure only of my grammar, sure of my flaws, sure today is a day in September.

Alex Behm is a writer and translator from West Virginia. Her writing can be found in The Common, The Rumpus, Politics/Letters, Cleaver, and elsewhere. She is earning her PhD at Columbia University.