The Book Nook

16

 We ended up out on a patio of a nearby restaurant, a small and round little table between the two of us, a heavy canvas umbrella rising up from the middle so that we had to tilt our chairs just enough so it wouldn't be rising up directly in between our eye-line to one another. The patio was glass partitioned off from the rest of the world, tables like ours scattered about and mostly filled, the conversation and the music drifting out from inside creating an atmosphere where we could talk to one another and not hear or be heard by any of the nearby tables.

A salad sat in front of each of us with a large bowl of poutine fries centered between us as we took turns poking a few fries with our forks.

I couldn't recall having been out in such a public place with Alexandria before. All our other adventures had been taking place no earlier than dusk and the library, whilst being considered public, had a particularly isolated and private feel to it that I didn't consider it being 'out in public' quite at all.

My guess was that we would most likely spend our meal just talking about mundane and everyday things, like the weather or work or what we were going to do this week. Those things seemed like appropriate and befitting table conversation for such an averagely normal setting in which we weren't burning books, roaming through a maze of a library, or spinning through a kids park at midnight. For once, I had thought, being in such a setting might give her a chance to just blend in and not be pressed to be the unpredictable chaos that she is.

"I don't really go out in public like this very much," she declared, just as I was thinking along those same lines. "Not that I hate it or am completely lethargic to it. I just prefer not to. I get enough human interaction in the rest of my life that I don't feel the need to overcompensate."

"Right, balance. I get ya. And I'm perfectly okay with having limited dinner dialogue," I assured her. "We don't have to stay long."

"No, it's not that. I'm okay being here and talking here. I just don't do it much, so it feels very out of place."

I agreed with her.

She smoothed her black blouse and gave a ruffle to her blue-streaked hair, letting it fall down against either of her shoulders. It was looking most voluminous, I had to say, though I neglected to point out aloud.

"But it's a good place to just sit and let the world just kind of pass on by," I said. "You could sit here for hours at a corner table like this and watch a myriad of people come and go." I even suspected that she had probably done just that.

"There's many places good for that. And yeah, this is one of those. So much life can occur in a place like this. All you have to do is watch."

We both turned our heads to look out amongst the scattered heads of patrons filling up most of the tables, tucked away into their own conversations, laughing and drinking.

"I assume watching the world pass by is a common Alexandria hobby?"

She laughed briefly. "I'm a writer, life is supposed to pass me by while I watch it. I discovered that writers never felt they belonged anywhere. That was one of the main reasons they became writers."

"Huh," I said. "Never thought of it like that."

She held a moment after saying those words and I almost missed it, but I caught just enough of a far-off look in her eyes that expressed what I thought to be an almost loneliness. She wasn't looking quite at me but rather off in the distance a bit behind of me.

I was puzzled by it all. A girl who seemed on the cover to, in most every sense, have it all. The looks, the intelligence, the ambition. But something was missing, something she knew was missing even if she did not quite know what. Somehow, I caught all of that in that single forlorn expression that crossed over her when she didn't realize that I was looking. Something that I could not accurately describe other than being some sort of infinite sadness.