A Well-Lit Eating Space

Left hand on the right one, with a lit forgotten cigarette in between two fingers, I am sitting in a dirty populous café. I’m told that I have a rendezvous with three people and they haven’t showed up yet. I don’t remember at all if someone in my last night’s dream has told me so or someone in the real world. Or maybe this is a false thought or illusion. I have to wait anyway and see how it goes. Here the air is full of smoke but I enjoy the smoke of my cigarette spread in the whole air and dissolve in others’ smoke. It causes a kind of useless unity that I haven’t seen anywhere. Smoke should dissolve in smoke and stone should tear stone. There is no special explanation for this, but I like the structure and the dream behind it.

A girl sits in front of me and puts her bag and umbrella beside my cup. I watch people under the rain from the window beside me. The girl orders a tea and sugars it. After drinking her tea she starts advising me while I am not in a big shock. She tells me to be in love like her and see how interesting life would be, how sweet! I am gazing at people outside whose lives are way too interesting like hers. She talks for one hour with a complicated bad voice that I don’t hear anymore after a few minutes. My trousers have become slightly wet by the water flowing from her umbrella on the table and so I feel somehow cold in my back. She leaves I think after the same one hour and I chase her among the wet crowd.

I light another cigarette and puff on it when I open my eyes, to the face of a young man who is sitting opposite me. He is so good-looking with a nice beard. When I get that he is insisting on things which are tried once by a part of me, I don’t unconsciously hear him anymore. He takes out a book from his pocket and starts reading it to me. I don’t know to what religion it belongs to, but I feel I have heard the content before frequently. He doesn’t order anything to drink or eat. I remember his face well while he was drowning in my cigarette smoke, moving the air by his left hand while keeping the book in his right hand. The rain keeps falling on young men and women and speeds their actions in a funny way. The young man leaves me while I am gazing at a full-of-water hole outside in which people put their feet and the water splashes around. One drop falls on the surface of the glass next to me. He pats me on my back warmly though I don’t feel any warmness at all. He comes and goes like a breeze and he vanishes among other wet people whose noses are reddened by coldness of January. I wonder again for whom I am waiting here and how they would look like. I don’t know how many cigarettes I have extinguished in this wooden ashtray and here is the last one for now.

I put my head on the table and close my eyes for seconds. I order another coffee and when the old waitress brings it to me she sits down opposite me. I am surprised and I think maybe she is tired and wants to relax for seconds. Drinking my coffee I look deep into her eyes. She looks back into my eyes and says she was once young and beautiful like all those people out there. That she has many sweet memories from the past. She tells me to always hang on to my memories. Old people like their past because they have no other thing to stick to and talk about. And her old sad voice melts in my ears after a few minutes. Someone calls her and she goes. I look at my watch. I’ve waited there for a couple of hours for people whom I don’t know yet. I put the money on the table and wear my coat. When I open the door of the café, a cool breeze touches my face like the hand of an ex-friend. I take a deep breath and depart. The streets are empty and dark blue.