Espresso Love (A Dystopian Japan Novel) #Wattys2014

Golden Child

I had sat there for a long while, watching her back vanish into the school of bobbing heads like fish, to join the chorus of stomping feet in syncopated rain-beat rhythm. Her figure and the way her hips moved as she walked briskly, upright, chest out, in cool business-like confidence forever etched itself into my mind. Even when she had disappeared, I was still sitting there.

My mind had been mostly empty, blank, a new slate. Her words had seemed to wash over me like a cold tide. At the time, I was too much summer to achieve that inner gravitation towards my own world within, to truly comprehend her words. She hadn't seemed to be in a rush, yet when I could mull her words over, I realized she had just dropped an entire novel's worth of content on my lap. To sit on my mind like a solid weight, sinking to the bottom of a muddied pool.

I didn't bother to surface or struggle against gravity. Whatever she meant, I could not begin to fathom then. Whenever I tried to think about it, a headache would ensue. Whenever she talked to me, it was as though I was sailing an enormous ocean where there was no visible shoreline, lost in the middle of an unending canvas of frothing waters and infinite horizons. Sometimes I would drown and sink like a rock. Other times I would remain aloft, floating, suspended on some powerful cushion.

Despite the resounding beauty in her eyes and in her mannerism, I could not bring myself to believe her for an instant right then. I had already laid out what she had said in front of me on the table like dealing playing cards to customers at a casino. 1) Orders at a coffee shop said something about the person drinking it. 2) She is observant and was watching me buy books at Kinokuniya. 3) Summer is for the flesh, winter is for the inner mind, and winter is better. 4) We are specks that seem to sit without changing, but things are changing now.

Among the four pieces of information she had left me, I could find no correlation. Why had she spoken of such things and how did one point flow into another? Were they all part of one painting or separate paintings that made a series? Or was she just throwing random sketches into the air at whim?

What was particularly alarming were her last words. Things were starting to change. Change could be good or bad, depending on what it was and what it affected. Then it also depended on the person experiencing it or the person perceiving it. Like in my paperback Mao II, the novelist could have continued on, writing in darkness, isolated, pure, untouched, an endless manuscript - but yet once the outside world was let in, it would change everything.

Mao II stares at me with a brazen intensity now. Yes, I just need to continue on - I don't need change, I decide. My paperback books are fine. I can live with my paperbacks and seasonal coffee.

But if I would remember anything at all, it would be: tall caramel chai tea latte, soy, 120 degrees, extra whip. Chai tea girl. I try to imprint her order into my mind. "It can make a big difference," she had said. Something tells me not to take any chances with her order. 

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