Fall was always my Spring

Between two cold buildings- knees to her chest with her back propped against the cool of the bricks, she was sitting in the sliver of the sunlight.
There was the lighthearted chorus of foot traffic some where off on the sidewalk. The sound of it she found soothing, and there in the light when she should have been at her desk, she felt like a thief and was happy.

‘hey’, said some newly arrived boy, hands in pockets and with an untucked shirt and hair more raked than combed. She echoed his greeting, trying to hide her annoyance. Even when she wanted to be she couldn’t make herself be rude.

‘you want a cigarette?’ he stuck a hand forward and a box and she noticed the sleeves of his shirt were too short for his arms. She was not prone to pettiness but unwilling to criticize herself for simply being attentive, and after all it was he who interjected himself into her late afternoon burglary.

She showed him the one she had in her left hand. She smoked it less than she held it, it was more than her excuse to be out there, it was a tether that connected her to a world beyond the incessant clattering of keys and the unbearable droning on of the feigned drama of the office space. He awkwardly chuckled. She wanted to close her eyes but she had learned not to close her eyes in front of strangers.

‘Was your dad in the army or something?’ he was leaning now, upright, he looked like an upturned raked set against a wall. She thought of her father, his careless hair and his rumbling laughter, the stains on his fingers. She imagined him sitting in a room littered with books. This wasn’t a memory, it was the projection of the idea of him. She did not know the room, or even him in that scene. It was less of what was and more of what should of have been. She smiled to herself when she thought that in a way he had been a soldier, fighting the most important of wars. That that war might have even consumed him in time but had not prevented him from spending that afternoon on the floor of her bedroom listening to ‘August and Everything After’.

Looking somewhere off into the sunlight, ever narrowing, she answer through her smile with a soft head shake, ‘no’.

‘oh, well I really dig your look’. He stammered out, ‘the combat boots and the sundress is cool.’ She decided that this was either his first attempt to talk to a girl ever or the most awkward approach she’d ever seen. She peered at him, dressed as he was she wouldn’t have been able to tell if he was 18 or 30. His face told the story, and made the whole scene rather unforgivable.

She wished she could have told him to shut up. To sit down. That he could share her sunlight if he’d just be quiet. She wasn’t here after all for the building of cathedrals, she was here to steal for herself that thing that is never given only taken.

She could hear the gears in his head churning towards another approach. She killed the back half of her cigarette and drew herself up. There was a stiffness in her hips and she allowed herself to let her frustration to slide away, they told the truth that she had been sitting there longer than she thought.

‘Thanks, I gotta go back to work.’

‘Oh, okay. See you around.’ They were two feet apart and he waved. But did not realize that she walked towards the light not back to the door with the rock between it and the jam.

The right she took out of the alley put her onto the side walk, bathed in sun, and heading away. It was almost five anyway. The last half hour of work was only ever two groups of people forecasting their weekends – children soccer games or black outs- trying to convince the other party of the wonders of the lives the lead. She knew more times than not, each desperately wanted the others’.

She walked a few blocks, she didn’t have a destination. But when she passed the little pub with the two boys playing guitars she stopped. Through the open street side windows she could hear them, they weren’t any good but there was something about how they threw themselves into the music that made her so happy. She sat a table for two, ordered a beer, listened to them try to win over the five other patrons by virtue of their unabashed enthusiasm.

They played through two beers. When they announced they were taking a break she and some sixty year old drunk clapped. She thought the other patrons looked relieved. Without the music she lost focus and found herself staring at the golden light prisming through her half empty pint glass.

She didn’t see him approach, the left half of the duo. She looked up and his face was fixed with a pirate’s smile, and his unruly dark brown hair hung to his shoulders. There was an outlined black sparrow on his forearm and under it some tattooed words she couldn’t make out.

‘What did you think?’ he asked.

‘I’m not really sure how to describe it,’ she grinned and he took the bait.

‘Just give it a shot.’

‘Sisyphus learning guitar?’ she suggested and the laugh that came out of him could have warmed a whole home. His beer showed up, and he asked, ‘Mind if I stay?’

‘Only if you leave me alone.’ She didn’t know how that came out, or from where the inflection in her voice came, or how she knew he would understand.

‘I promise.’

And the sat the in inexplicable happiness that is the October sunlight, silent drinking their beers, while the bar slowly began to fill.