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Coffee and Travel in your spare time:
Does it improve perception? by Phrene
Early hours in mid-summer seem to boast the most amazing noises and scents.
Faint chirping and the quuueee-que, quuueee-que, of the cricket’s hind legs
share the same space inside a dewey, fresh cut grass and waking pine trees
kind of place. In all its serenity, the sleepy bedroom towns of New York are
hazy to me at that hour, especially without a coffee partner to share
intimate speak with.
This age however, has brought me a new friend who knows not the chains of the
workday schedule, nor is torn from the boundaries of exhaustion. It is
expansive, it is everywhere and anywhere I want to be, yet it is not a dream.
It is here, in my bedroom with me. Perhaps it is some sort of time-space
vehicle built for the mind only. How else could I be in Germany each morning
having coffee with my friend, around 4:30 a.m. without physically traveling?
So many lost souls, ghosting around these machines, it's no wonder something
like I am about to tell you could happen.
There was this person, a man, or so (he) claimed, that would pop up on my
computer screen from time to time. I'm still unsure as to how or why he
found me, but nevertheless, we engaged in sleepy coffee talk for a while. It
was strange that he was always there waiting for me. Never once had I called
to him. It always seemed odd that his response time was so lacking. So many
questions ran rampant in my mind. Perhaps he was married, engaged in other
conversations, maybe not even a man at all. There was no way to tell, but
the conversations helped me keep my sanity. They were surface, but at the
same time intimate.
His screen name was Candhrall. I shared with him was my desire to eat
cheddar cheese, thinly sliced, on triscuits in the late night and the way I
enjoyed my Margaritas best- very tangy, salted glass, not frozen. He told me
about his favorite pair of socks. They were wool, dark gray in color, with
reinforced toes and he always wore them, even during sex. We knew nothing of
the towns each came from, of family, of employment or even names. We had no
descriptions to concoct any mind presence of physical beauty or ugliness, no
phone numbers, no nothing. All we had was our coffee talks, reminiscing of
long walks somewhere.
The autumn was my favorite; the spring his. The smell of cinnamon apple tea
and fresh pancakes with strawberries and whipped cream made my heart long for
lost days of weekend trips; soft, silent skins intertwined like bramble in
the wind. His nostalgia for lost loves, who to me knew no name or face, was
in a garden. From his description, all that could be envisioned of his old
love was her heavy heart and two silhouettes, walking through the new life of
spring, earmarked by tulips, daffodils and crocus. It was there he would
find out he would never kiss her, embrace her, or even ever see her again.
He knew me as C, that was all. Strange things began to happen in my life,
not soon after the infamous Candhrall disappeared, and it is exactly those
strange occurrences that I need to share right now.
Jobless at the time, I often took brisk walks into town, especially in the
cooler early evenings. Upon entering my favorite dive bar one Saturday, a
strange, much older woman came up to me and said, (It's three a.m., I bet you
are hankering for a hunk of cheddar cheese and some triscuits right about
now.) How strange that I had never met her and she knew precisely I'd such
ridiculous unhealthy habits as that. Maybe there were a few friends, who knew
that, but slim they were, and they certainly had no acquaintance to her that
could possibly be assumed. Of course this prompted me to ask around and find
out if there were any logical, simple reasons for the occurrence, perhaps it
was a common acquaintance or something. After a week of deliberation no
stone was not over turned and I resolved to give it up to God, for only he
knew how she could have read my mind.
The following Wednesday I decided to go to for a mall visit, hoping to find a
gift for my sister's birthday. In the middle of the women's lingerie floor
of Lord and Taylor, a very dark, hairy man approached me from behind. He
maneuvered his hairy arm around my waist just precisely enough to avoid
touching me and held out a pair of pink lace panties and whispered, "Wow,
wouldn't it be a sight to watch you sitting in bed spilling wine all over
yourself in these." The situation left me in shock and disgust and as I
turned around to tell him "where to go" with his outrageously rude comment,
he was gone, as if he had evaporated into thin air. I turned back around to
continue looking at the rack I had been pricing prior to his arrival. I
quivered at the sight of the panties he had held on the floor in front of me.
I bent to pick them up. They were the same exact panties that an old
boyfriend had given me a year or so ago. They had come with a Teddy.
I had harbored bad feelings about that night for a long time and never spoke
of it to anyone, besides a brief interpretation, more adjectives describing
emotion than actual detail, to Candhrall. The memory hurt too much. The
first and only time I had ever worn that nighty I did not like the fit. My
boyfriend and I had been sitting in our hotel Room in upstate New York, and
it was there I spilled Pinot Grigio all over those very same panties the
strange man had dropped in front of me.
I left the mall immediately and when I arrived home dialed my ex-boyfriend.
He giggled when I brought up the incident, but said all too believably, (and
cold to my ears), "Gosh C, I haven't even thought about that in a year." It
only hurt me to hear him confirm that he hadn't thought of me and I was angry
for even being so foolish as to call him. I decided to take a different route
in sorting out the matter.
I retrieved the panties from the bottom depths of my lingerie drawer and
called Lord and Taylor. The manager of the department told me not only did
they return the panties to the vendor 8 months ago, but the maker no longer
made that style, or any copycats of it. It took about a week to forget about
the incident and I tossed it up to a mixture of male perversion and
meaningless coincidence.
I never described the outfit to Candhrall, I had instead used the spilling of
the wine incident in an analogy of the way my heart felt when I lost all that
I had wanted in my love life, blood spilling out, everywhere, on everything
that was beautiful or connected to intimacy.... that's how I explained my
memory of the wine. My question at this point really pointed to the strange
man in the store. Where did that weirdo get the panties from? Whatever.
Next scenario.
On a weekend trip to the Jersey Shore with my girlfriend, we decided to have
breakfast. The waitress came over to the table to take our order. Anna
asked for egg whites and a side of toast. I wanted pancakes with
strawberries. The waitress returned to the table to refill my coffee and
said, "Hey now, it's been a long time since you ordered that. Brings back
memories, don't it? " I looked at her and said, "Excuse me?"
The waitress replied smugly, "What?"
I asked her why she would say that to me. She just looked at me like I was
crazy and had no idea what I was referring to. Anna then looked at her and
said, "Didn't you just ask my friend about her pancakes?" The waitress
looked at her with crunched eyebrows and answered, "I only asked if you girls
wanted some more coffee is all."
She walked away with a frustrated look about her and did not come back with
the food for 45 minutes. As the waitress set the plates down she said, "Oh,
you forgot to say you wanted your whipped cream so I just went on back and
had the guy put it on for you how you like."
"Did you even want whipped cream?" Anna said to me, as alien waitress lady
walked away. I didn't even answer that time. I just ate my food quietly and
lost myself in the past.
The waitress was right, I hadn't ordered my pancakes the way I really liked
them since Nathan left me. It had reminded me of all our weekend excursions
together in the Adirondacks and somehow for the longest time, I just couldn't
stomach it. Funny thing is, Anna was brand new in my life, had never known
Nathan or anything about our past together and certainly knew nothing of my
eating habits quite yet.
At this point I was freaking. The waitress was an alien or a monster or
something. Maybe spirits had taken over her body for a brief moment when she
said those things to me and that's why she couldn't remember two seconds
later. All I knew was that Anna too, had witnessed the weirdness and maybe it
wasn't just me losing my mind.
We went home Sunday evening. I sat at the computer for a while to look for a
job.
From the moment I got on until the very quick and panic-stricken flip of the
off switch, I was taunted. I began to open some e-mails , thinking some were
junk mail and had to be deleted. It was people I didn't know and they were
making comments about the boy I beat up in elementary school and how I
cheated on my math test in the seventh grade. They started to pop up on my
screen through instant message and ask me what I was really doing last night
when I locked myself in the bathroom at the Jersey Shore and why should I cry
over someone who didn't love me anyway. "Why did you steal those pantyhose
from Kmart instead of just running out to my car for some money, even if you
were late for the wedding," popped up on my screen inquisitively.
"What about the time that school boy tried to rape you" scared one Instant
Message, why didn't you tell anyone, why do you allow it to give you bad
nightmares even still always thinking about how you could have handled it
differently, avoided it even;......followed by "how could you stand at your
mothers bedside with a knife, what could possibly have hurt you to make you
so mad at her to even pretend to......."
They bombarded me and it happened so quickly there was no time to even
respond they just kept jumping up on my screen. Some with accusatory
statements, others with sadness, some with empathy of loneliness and then the
worst, the ones with anger pulsating through their veins. Just as I jumped
up to shut down the computer the strange computer man Candhrall arrived and
typed this to me:
"Yes, we see. Do you?"
Freaky, but true. I'm not as fond of the computer as I used to be. I started
using it again but under completely different circumstances. So far
everything seems to be pretty normal, but I have my doubts.
