[Just something in my head I felt like jotting down.]
“What do you want?”
He looked down at his hands. Freckle on the knuckle just above his scuffed, white gold wedding ring. “I want to be real.”
“Are you not real now?”
“Real with people.”
At the next table, a coffee cup was refilled, and a slender wife asked her wide husband how much farther he thought it was to Chimney Rock.
“Real with people,” she echoed. “What does that mean?”
He blew air out of his nose and mouth, pushing the sticky edge of the table with his fingertips. “I don’t want to put up a front. When I talk to people, I want them to feel like they’re getting me, not some face I put up or a rehearsed line I use on everyone.”
“You put up faces and rehearse lines?”
“Not on purpose,” he said, then paused. “Well. Sometimes. Sometimes I’ll be driving to work and realize that for the past five minutes, I’ve been thinking of different ways to say hello to my coworkers; trying them out in my head, trying to decide which one sounds the most — ”
“–real. And what do you do when you find yourself doing this?”
“It’s embarrassing. Rehearsing how to say ‘hello?’ Who does that?”
She was silent for a while. He looked up. She sat like a moth, brown and white against the mossy, sun-faded wallpaper. Her eyes, soft as moth-wings, fluttered as her mind pursued a delicate truth. “Maybe people who’ve forgotten to listen to how the other person says hello.”