mood: quasimusic: 'suffragette city' by david bowie

i once met a man whose glower made me feel something i'd never felt before. it wasn't a feeling of simple distrust. nor was it one of absolute distrust. instead, it was a feeling that he was the kind of man who spent his whole life thinking and not hating, like his face would have told others.

with this revelation in mind, i realized he had a 'heavy' face, and i don't mean the kind of euphemism you use when you talk about one of your friends. i mean heavy as in thought. as in seriousness. as in iron. what traveled through this man's head, i couldn't see. but what was visible were the footprints of those thoughts, tracked across his face. every line, every crease, every shade told a new story. and though i didn't know the stories, i their weight, and they were heavy.

with this in mind i walked towards him. i don't know if he saw me or not, but when i got to his table, he looked up at me, but didn't change a single thing on his face.

'excuse me,' i asked, 'would you mind if i bummed a cigarette?'

now, i quit smoking a long time ago, but my curiousity of this man was calling me, and i couldn't think of any other reason someone would walk up to someone else at a cafe, especially when the someone else looked like this guy.

he kept looking at me and very politely said, 'sorry, i don't smoke.' and for the moment it seemed like the whole world was falling apart.

i would have put money on the fact that he smoked. with a look on his face like that? easily a pack every two or three days. i mean, even i started smoking to keep from going insane with sadness (read: teen angst), and i didn't even have it that bad.

'ah, ok. thanks anyway,' i said, following with a quick 180 and a forced non-chalant walk back to my table. and even though i knew that he probably went right back to staring sadly at his sugar container, i could feel my back turning bright red. maybe i had a little more thinking to do myself.

---Goei---