Metsa #Wattys2016

Maybe She's An Alien Too

A girl seated at a table, three tables from mine. Straight ahead, draw a straight line and there she was. Swallowed by the busy crowd. Everyone would walk past without looking at her in the slightest, yet I always managed to keep her somewhere in my field of vision. Every past night that I've been here for the past six months at least, she would sit there isolated with no drink in hand and no six-dollar cinnamon roll before her sprawled out on a cheap napkin. There were never any signs that indicated that she had purchased anything or really had any business here other than to sit at the small, round table. And that's what she would do; sit and do nothing else but sit some more, to the point where she became the chair, its deformed-clam-shaped-platform, a prehistoric relic that originally belonged to a tribe of highly evolved, telekinetic, sentient squids that possessed black magic and used the device to enhance their summoning power to call forth their God of wrath, "Super-Mega-Ultra-Nautilus" to crush their enemies, white-mage sea urchins that wished to unite all the aquatic life, being that they saw all aquatic life as equal (a philosophy the proud squids very much disagreed with); the plan to kill the sea urchins succeeded, but its blast radius was so powerful that it engulfed everything within 2,000 miles, thus also killing all the highly evolved squids in the process; the "summoning abacus" as the squids called it, was swallowed up in a shockwave that turned into a tsunami and was catapulted to an ocean located all the way across the planet, and was never seen again until, flash forward a million years later to present day, a fisherman reeled it out, mistook it as a very nice, big chunk of wood, (probably once part of a boat belonging to some Aztec-esque civilization, he concluded, noting its intricate designs), dried it out and gave it to his cousin who owns a woodworking and furniture business, and he decided to fashion it into a chair and then sold it to the cafe at a rather steep, but overall reasonable price, and one day the girl decided to go to the cafe, and sat on the chair and due to the birthmark on her inner left thigh, which very suspiciously looks like Super-Mega-Ultra-Nautilus, the dormant black magic was channeled once more, forever binding and trapping her to the chair where she can no longer move, until the spell is broken.

The latest fictional background I assigned to her. Every day, it was something new, something different. The thought that maybe there was something so radically unique, strange and absurd about her, comforted me. She became an object of my own imagination, absurd, fictional fantasies circled around her image, quickly devolving into delusion. Even as my logical mind rejected these delusions, my illogical mind accepted them and clung to them, finding solace in them being true, somehow. Maybe she was an alien too. A visitor from another planet, a time-traveler, artificial intelligence, cosmic shape-shifter, some higher-dimension apparition only accessible through psychedelics, or simply a convoluted mind that rendered reality differently than the masses....ignoring the specifics, she was an alien too. Sitting in that chair, body and face positioned completely forward at perfect symmetry, yet so eerily that it defied all universal law; not moving at all, not blinking, arms resting motionless below the table, everyone walking past her like she was nothing, she not interacting with anyone like she was nothing or like they were nothing...it wasn't normal. What was the reason behind her not being normal? What was the meaning behind it, if any? Could this meaning be related to me? It could be, but was it.

I wanted to entrust my Inner World to her, pull it free from my mind, crush it into a sort of marble and give it to her, let it rest in her hands and let her do whatever she wanted with it. I wanted to reveal to her all of myself, down to every absurd, and grimy detail. Things that I've kept away from myself even, I wanted her to know in full detail. I wouldn't be satisfied with anything less. In turn, I wanted her to do the same. I wanted to see, touch, and feel her Inner World as if it was my own, and learn all I could of her until there was no separation between I and her. Why? Because she was an alien, and I was an alien. She would understand all of me and I would understand all of her. Two aliens understanding each other as native.

Maybe such a thought was a romanticized exaggeration--no differently than believing myself to be an alien--or maybe it was something I truly wanted. Needed, even. Either way, instead of actually doing something, I stole glances at her frequently for the next minute or so, without any sort of discreet that made it seem like I wasn't staring at her. Such as, looking around at other parts of the room or staring down at my cell-phone, feigning that I was doing something with it. Instead, my head metamorphosed into a broken fan that could only turn in one direction. Look at her; look back at my cup. Look at her; look back at my cup. Luckily, it didn't appear that she noticed, her statue presence remaining a statue. That was good but perhaps in retrospect, it would have been better if she did. If she noticed me looking at her, would she do anything about it then? Why can't you just join me? The thought dropped to the bottom of my mind's platform, the hope that she would stand up and come over here sliding with it, but I knew it was the equivalent of viewing the moon through a telescope in hopes it would wink at you.

Yup, another typical night. I sighed and looked back at my hands cocooning my cup. The cup was mostly cold now, but its decayed heat still kept my hands warm.

Why can't I do this? Why can't I talk to her?

Because you're an alien.

But goddammit! It was time for this alien to be useful for once in its crummy life! What's the point of being an alien if you don't do anything alien? I can't fly a UFO, I can't teleport, I can't shoot laser beams out my third tentacle...so gathering up the goddam courage to talk to some girl in a coffee shop is my alien power! Yes! And if anything bad happens, I can simply blame it on me being an alien. Win-win situation!

I picked up my half-full cup then stood up, finally breaking the routine that I've been chained to for centuries. I began walking, weaving my way through the crowd, ushering out the thought saying, "You'll only get hurt, but it doesn't have to be that way. Just set down your cup, sit in your seat, and finish your drink like you always do you forever alone loser." I made my way to the table and with, I imagine a forced and rather awkward wave, said "hello".

My hand stayed stationary in the air just like my smile, but they both quickly fell limp like murdered balloons. My smile turned to discontent and my arm fell to my side. Here I looked right at her and said hello--staring RIGHT at her--yet the only acknowledgment I received was a very subtle widening of the eyes similar to trying to rid yourself of a loose eyelash. She...clearly wasn't interested. Fair enough.

I had no business loitering about, so with a minor, silent scowl of disappointment, only truly amplified inside the safety of my head, I turned around and began walking away reflecting on what just happened, unable to tell if the anti-climatic moment was an absurd, moment of depression or a piece of high-art.

As my mind drew up a mental map on how to get back to my seat, a voice sounding as fragile as a crystal corsage called out to me:

"Wait, were you talking to me?"