As I Took A Sip of Tea in a Coffee Shop (by Steve Tieri)

Rushing, rushing, rushing

~more hurried then the word itself.

A new word needs to be created to describe it more accurately.

Me first, quicker, hurry

Things have changed; not for the better, not fast enough~

My patients have become impatient

I fumble, why have I gotten so clumsy?

My mind meanders~

Its autofocus-mechanism continues to search for tack sharp, but fails to lock on.

What was it again that I was thinking about?

Snap out of it!

Oh right, I’m driving to work… again, my nomad mind shifts… awareness drifts…

Ah, time to pull in for a coffee, I never splurge, that’ll straighten me out.

Off sync

Off balance

Physically and mentally, I am two incongruent angles.

Math is usually constant, 1 + 1 is always 2… I feel a bit off, a bit obtuse.

Nothing makes sense~

Jumbled piles of irregular pieces from mixed puzzles await with hope, lying helplessly-dormant in my mind.

Wake Up!

Startled into the “now”~ I am at my destination.

I let a woman’s car enter the parking lot before mine, not sure why.

~equal pace to the entryway~

We each sift and filter through the bulky, tumbling snowflakes as if there is a quicker, clearer path to follow… heads are low while pupils indirectly peek upward to maintain course.

Normally this would be a race to be first in line.

Something slows me down to absurdity.

I hold the door open for her and she lowers the landing gear, approaching the counter while the napkins disperse freely from the draft of her presence…

Paper snowflakes glide and meander to the hardwood softly.

Oddly unhurried, I follow from an observer’s distance, comfortably within her draft.

I suddenly have the ability to see through the eyes of a fly, in super-slow-motion, as the world around me stops and I journey through the scene. The moment waits for me to catch up and when I arrive behind her in line, the spinning Earth now continues at normal speed allowing me to reconnect in real-time.

The woman orders her daily usual and turns to me and asks what I am ordering and that she will pay for it.

Shocked~ Off guard~ Off sync~ Off balance~

But why would she do this? I have so many questions~

This woman’s long, curly, red hair was doing that “slow-motion blowing in the wind thing”… but we were both standing perfectly still. How can she do that? I thought that was only something you see in movies. It’s not a real thing…

The camera zollies inward… yes, zolly! It zooms in and dolly’s backwards at the exact same speed giving an unusual illusion that I am approaching but going backwards simultaneously. It is quite a cinematic dramatic moment… in my mind anyway.

Speechless~ stammering~

I sputter, “Thank you, but I was going to do the same for you.”

I ordered a white peach tea, not coffee. I’ve never ordered a tea before.

I cautiously asked, “So now what?” ~I wasn’t sure what I was really asking… attempting to determine if this was truly “a moment” or simply wanting to know where she was off to next… if I’d ever see her again. How would I repay her random act of kindness?

She answered “Boston.” …and she dissipated like the draft she rode in on.

Whoosh.

I sat briefly, sipped at my scalding tea and opened a book that I wasn’t listening too…

The words kept talking to me.

I kept reading the same line, time and time again I tried, and it felt like I was unable to decode the words of a lost language… it wouldn’t and couldn’t make any sense to me.

I kept thinking about long flowing red hair… a quick smile… a slow moment…

As I took a sip of tea in a coffee shop.