Dancing with the Sun People

It wasn’t until later that she realized what had happened, much later, after she had been sitting by the fountain for some time, one hand holding a Styrofoam cup half-full of cappuccino, the other brushing windswept hair from her tired eyes. Periodically, she sipped. A stiff October wind forced her to breathe in a lifetime of insignificant events and blurred priorities, but for now, in this moment, they did not surface and only passed over her like a rainy-day shadow. Across the quad, like a stoic guard of old, stood the old law library. Its crumbled staircase climbed somberly up to the entrance like a Greek temple she once saw in Life magazine. For one second it seemed possible that she might someday touch the pillars of some such Parthenon or dance naked with the Sun-people as they worshipped dancing gods.

A trail of somber, robotic students rushed by like an out-of-control assembly line, blindly searching for their classrooms through hangovers and desperate all-nighters. I am solitude, she wondered, unaware. I am. A curly-haired man walked around the fountain, and then back again, and she imagined having slow sex with him underneath the moon, slow, deliberate love without names or conditions or complications of the familiar. She crossed and uncrossed her legs. Took a sip of cappuccino. Then crossed her legs again. She didn’t remember to think about job interviews or homework or growing old, about her clock ticking, so many clocks, or the dishes piled high in her kitchen sink, a monument to procrastination.

Forgetfulness can be a glorious thing if you don’t realize you have forgotten.

Someone yelled, “Fuck!” and she returned to now, sensing a pending urgency of some kind, something that needed to be taken care of right now, that she should be doing instead of this. Something dire and more important than cappuccino and gods.

Somewhere, in that brief eternity between awake and unaware, she couldn’t help but laugh.