nevermore
by Megan Chunn
I thought I had abandoned her in the corner of the cafe, but I had forgotten that the petite wooden table held two russet-colored lattice-back chairs. The waiter seated me across from her. I slouch and tuck my tail between my legs.
The waiter, dressed neatly in an ivory linen button-up and polyester trousers, maneuvers around the one-way mirror that disconnects me and her. It rests in the middle of the table, created by my curiosity.
All because I made the mistake of looking her up, I mean looking up at her. I saw her, some thoughts, and a glimpse of her life. I continuously hurt myself, which is my current insight. Looking over to my right, I see the waiter return.
He hands us our coffees. Hers is a round cream and blue vintage porcelain mug, painted with hummingbirds and California fuchsias, placed in her vicinity. Mine, a flared ceramic black and white tattooed patchwork mug, was handed directly to me.
I watch as she absentmindedly picks the cup up, sips the red-eye coffee, makes a face, and throws the mug. I feel her anger radiate off each move, hatred of the choices she has made, and me being one of them.
With the mug being thrown off the edge of the one-way mirror, a sliver of it slid my way. Knocking against my foot, I couldn’t help but answer. Quickly, as my response time to the blue texts, I sent back to my might-as-well-be mistress. Picking up the piece, it instantly knicks my thumb, the blood rushing down the fragment, staining the beautifully dyed item.
“That’s all I can do, is it?” I ask her through the mirror, only for her to look down, head in her hands, with a prodigious frown. She can’t hear me. She didn’t care that I wrote her a letter; I am not sure what she’s done with it. I assume she tossed it immediately, but something tells me she burned it ceremoniously.
As my thoughts wandered into what she did with my letter, my mug began to overflow. I tried cleaning it with the pearl-colored cotton handkerchief on the table, but the Irish coffee bled through. Unbeknownst to those around, the bubble that was us began to unravel.
How are we still here after years of no contact? She doesn’t know the things that I know. I have to look through the mirror, helpless. She doesn’t know I am on the other side, she doesn’t want to know. There’s a reason I am the conscious one at the table. There’s a reason I am carrying the weight of what could’ve, would’ve, and should’ve been.
Because the unknowing is my fault.
I observe her through the glass again, just in time to see another woman peering above the woman across from me, talking to her, gesturing. The newly appearing character reminds me of me, but she’s not me. She’s going to get to do what I wish I could’ve done, and as soon as I thought that, she reached into her pocket, pulled out a ring, got on one knee, and proposed. With the two women leaving the table and me behind, shifting my reality.
Photo of Megan Chunn
BIO: Megan comes from a small country town in the south, she has a graduate degree from UNCW, a published poem, and is a lesbian. Her life experiences allow her to have unique perspectives and along with her bipolar diagnosis; she feels things deeper or rather more extremely than the average individual. In her free time she reads, writes, and cross-stitches. She owns a husky named Yogi and a cat named Dovah.