Inconsequentials

Hands wrapped around a coffee mug, sheer sorrow laden eyes, tranquil mind and a certain carefree yet conscious look, she sits in Imperial Café. The questions from the past pour in, “Why me?” “Did I deserve this?” and the automatic nature of the self-imposing thinking process kicks in. “May be I should have figured this out a while back.” “There were so many instances that I overlooked.” Like a certain flower burdened with mud, she sinks into her coffee.

“Remember, darling, our favorite coffee – decaf hazelnut.” She shakes out the very thought of him, in a giant slurp. Wide-eyed and bushy tailed children whiz past her chair, and she offers them not a giant smile or candy, but lets slip by a grief-stricken look. “The ground floor would be ours, children can take up the first floor, and you know, the less invasive, the better, yada yada.”

She growls at the thought of her ex-fiancé; “You forgot Judy’s room in the equation right next to ours.” “If only I had seen through you then.” “It has been six months so I have had time to heal” She gazed at certain formations in her coffee; as a young girl, she was tricked into drinking milk by her mother, who would guarantee a magic of sorts upon embarking on a journey to the dairy land and…. “Stop”, she almost yelled. “Reminiscing about my family is a form of nostalgia I will use to drape my inhibitions of dealing with my current problems.” “Ah Gosh, my psychology classes aren’t helping me one bit. I guess this is how my patients felt like every time they digressed from the sorry descriptions of the misfortunes of their self-professed pathetic lives and me having to correct them instinctively.”

“Sometimes it’s a tonic in itself, observing inconsequentialities when in deep thought,” her mother used to say.

She looks around and glances at a baby in mother’s hands joyfully playing with her newfound toy-her mother’s hair pin, some waitress at the back hymns melodiously to a song, a homeless man outside pounces on a coin tossed by a passerby, one kid makes a click click sound with a light switch which just won’t work, one customer makes a house of sugar packets and then chuckles at the crumbled state upon poking it, twins argue over a piece of chocolate, an old old lady whistles while reading her newspaper upside down; and the coffee machine releases a whooshing sound that seems like a soothing background music, another customer plays a beat with a fork and a spoon which seems weirdly to match the waitresses’ hymn and the lady's whistle, and suddenly the entire coffee shop comes to life, and her past gets buried in the back of her mind. She takes one satisfied sip. Quite a tonic.