Zoo Watching

I watch people during the day as if I were at a zoo. I stare and try to take photographs of them in their natural habitat. I follow zoo rules, I don't feed them or blow smoke in their faces. Sometimes they try to communicate with me, but I rarely understand them.

A person talking about their car or job or life tends to bore me. I listen with furrowed eyebrows. I nod my head according to tone and inflection, but nothing computes. 

I watch their body language, the way their hands flail when they are describing some event. The shape of their mouth, the lips stretching over their teeth. I watch the way the wind picks up strands of their hair and briefly lifts and then abandons the strand. I think about how hair is dead. I think about how some of the stars in the sky burned out years and years ago, but because of the speed of light and time and space etc, what we see as a "star" doesn't exist anymore. We think we see something, but it doesn't exist anymore, not in the way we understand existence. Existence isn't what it used to be. 

I watch the way he approaches me. His gentle tone, his friendly posture. He leans over to talk to me. I raise my eyes to meet his gaze. I watch his hands, the brief movements. The shuffling of his feet. I watch the way he licks his lips. I see the way his breath is released into the cold air and taken up in currents to the sky. I watch the skin on his neck pucker and stretch and he continues to emit unrecognizable utterances. 

I picture us on a beach. He is embarrassed that his legs aren't as tanned as mine. I laugh and tell him, no one cares about the paleness of his legs. I grab his hand to reassure him. We walk into the ocean, hands clasped, the cold water meeting the tips of our toes. The waves, meeting us, time and time again. Natural and predictive. He kisses my neck. I playfully push him away and tell him not in public. I smile coyly. He kisses my lips. We spend eternity in these minutes. Each gesture studied, each kiss refined, every breath accounted for.

He pauses, he furrows his eyebrows, he looks puzzled. Reassuringly I smile. I gently touch his arm and he continues his mutterings. 

I sit in my car quietly and smoke a cigarette. I think about the days events, what happened and what could have happened. I smile contently. I look at the glow of my cigarette burn more intense with each inhale. I turn the car on, I think to myself, "I could go anywhere." And then I drive home.