❛ let me be young again, & the story just starting. ❜ bea for johnson!
Large cities are distinguishably manmade. Scarce strips of grass pucker out between affluent neighborhoods like a poorly sewn quilt. On this street, there is no grass. Concrete for miles. Similar in color and texture to what Johnson remembers of the newly dried lava in Pompeii centuries upon centuries ago. The hubris of this place: an elected eruption of rock gerrymandered in opposition to nature into the blocky shape of a city.
Everything is closer together. Johnson sits outside, alone, at a restaurant table a foot from another party not because he chose or enjoys the proximity but because the small slab of stone the restaurant owner has legal ownership of can fit three tables worth of outside seating but only if discourteously packed. Johnson is in the seat which situates his back to the building despite the availability to sit in the chair next to the empty table on his right.
He's close enough to hear the conversation of the occupied table on his left. Close enough to hear their breathing. If the city weren't polluted with fast, mechanical noises that seem to linger, unwanted but unignored, like a continually scratched rash, he could likely hear the wet squeezing of their esophaguses when they swallow their food and the blunt clatter of their molars as they chew. Although, the necessary order would be reversed; Johnson does not eat. He ordered a large veggie pizza (that remains untouched) and its takeaway box because he saw a closed pizza box with this restaurant's name stamped on it in Mackenzie's fridge when she was cleaning her kitchen (one whiff from meters away and it was obvious it was veggie).
Mackenzie must frequent this restaurant due to its convenience: it's across the street, two buildings over; the food, Johnson gleams from the musings of the table beside him, is of subpar quality.
From here, he watches Mackenzie's apartment's street facing window. In the early evening and the late bright of Spring, the light leaking through the window is limp and washed out like a dribble of white too thin to stream out and is instead broken into a fine mist.
The woman at the other table: "Let me be young again and the story just starting."
Something there stirs in him.
Johnson's head swivels, his attention torn from Mackenzie's window, now set on Beatríz. She is elegantly dressed. Too formal for this restaurant. Perhaps it was a matter of convenience for her, too. Or—he notices her ring, her company's lack of one, the red wine, their fond tones—purposefully inconvenient for others.
Plainly, without introduction or invitation: "You can't go back. What you should want is to want for less. But the irony is, even that is not possible. It is only another want." A single, short laugh spasms out of him as uncomfortable and commandeering of his bodily organs as a hiccup.
