I did a quick once over of her face. It was the girl I'd seen outside the café as I was heading out for a smoke. We'd made accidental eye contact as she sat talking on her phone. She'd looked vaguely familiar but in that every Asian girl looks the same until proven innocent way. University Heights isn't exactly a normal haunt for me and I didn't know anyone who could possibly be coffee shopping in the middle of the day, unless it was Lilly or Hong, and they were already seated right in front of me.
"Michelle's friend?"
Ah yes. Everything clicked. Michelle, ex-marketing manager at Omnis and one of Hong's good friends. I had last seen her at Izzie's going away slash birthday party, held at an old dentist's office last July. I had gone solo and ended up spending most of the evening hanging out with Michelle and her friend. What was her name? Something hard to pronounce. They were wearing party themed appropriate Eighties costumes then.
Now, the girl's almond shaped hipster glasses, her grown out mussy hair, and the contemporary clothing had changed her look entirely. But I remembered her and we exchanged hellos as she sat down at a table immediately to my left. I pushed my chair back so we could talk around the wall that had previously separated us.
My mind raced trying to dredge up details about her, or anything from our conversations before. I remembered that we'd had a few good talks and we'd gotten along well but nothing specific was springing to mind. If I was Evie from "Out of This World," I'd have paused the scene right there and run to check my friend files for background information. No dice. Instead, I picked up my coffee -- which I finally noticed was a chai latte and not a vanilla latte -- and began to furiously sip to buy time.
Oh right, she lived on Alabama Street, possibly a few houses down from Jennifer. I'd mentioned that I was down there all the time and that we should play board games. Some prediction that turned out to be, since I haven't been down there much at all, especially post-July. My brain was going into overdrive trying to recall something else but I was drawing blanks. I still couldn't remember her name. With my memory putzing out on me, I quickly made the "These are my friends" move to figure it out.
"Nochi." Um right, there we go. Hong had met her before too, a long time ago.
I asked her what she was doing at a café in the afternoon and she said that she was studying for her hair stylist test the following week. Now the mental floodgates opened and I remembered what we'd talked about before. Lots of hair and fashion. I was still wrapping up the book and we talked about fun words and procedures I should incorporate into it. Fortuitously, I had packed one of the advance copies into my bag earlier that day and was able to pull it out to show her my make-under scene, for her amusement and assessment of hair dressing veracity.
As she flipped through the book while we chatted, the only other guy sitting in her area spoke up and asked, "You're a writer? Can I ask what it's about?"
Surprised that a total stranger had poked his head into the conversation, but kind of intrigued, I answered that it was a young adult book for teens. In the future, I should probably leave out the "young adult" part since it's redundant with "teens." I have to get better at describing what it is I do. Much better. I tend to just mumble my way through a deflating explanation.
"I'm a writer too," he said, with a head nod indicating his laptop. I glanced over and tried to surreptitiously read what was on-screen. Too far away.
"Really? What are you writing?" I replied. This was like an exciting moment, meeting a fellow writer in a coffee shop in the middle of the day? That's exactly what I want my future life to be like. The downside was that he was probably the least interesting looking person in the place -- everyone else was overtly trendy or semi-hipster intriguing -- and seemed to just be a regular bald white dude. But don't judge a book by its cover I guess. Or do maybe.
Waving a hand over his keyboard, he said, "I'm working on something more theoretical, sort of philosophy."
"Oh, I was a philosophy major." Now my interest was really piqued.
Turns out that was as exciting as it got. While he was a very nice guy, recently emigrated from New York, his project was still in the alpha stages and sounded like one of those "I had a life epiphany and it involved Buddha and spirituality and now I want to write about it." You know, something I'd want to write if I didn't already realize how cliché it was. And how ultimately it would only be of interest to one person: myself. You could launch a paper Titanic with the number of personal epiphany manuscripts waiting to be finished (written most often by thirtysomething males).
In the back of my mind, I kind of wanted to say, "Actually, my agent is sitting right around the corner, you should go talk to her about your exciting project." But then Lilly would have killed me and deposed of my corpse in her client slush pile. Writing career over, friendship sullied.
With fading enthusiasm about having met a fellow writer, I instead turned my attention to conducting the conversation between the three of us. I found myself trying to balance the conversation ratio between not being overly rude and disengaged versus making sure Nochi wasn't bored. I tend to ask follow up questions to everything, especially with strangers, and I couldn't prevent myself from firing away at him. I mean, he was pretty interesting, even if he was a bit of a Chatty Cathy. Actually, he was a lot of a Chatty Cathy and thirty minutes later I was ready for him to go.
I couldn't feel out what Nochi thought about him though. I mean, this was the second time we'd met ourselves. If it had been Lilly and I trapped in that situation, we would have been halfway down the street laughing about it ten minutes ago after shared mental eye rolls and one of us feigning sickness (her) and the other playing concerned friend (me).
Through Nochi's responses, I was trying to gauge if she was just being nice or she was genuinely interested in what the guy was talking about. By the time Nochi's friend appeared out of nowhere to join the table, I'd decided that the best case scenario was to just butt out and let the conversation run its course. I'd jump back in later after he left.
This is what I mean by my increased social anxiety over the years. I'm hyper aware of everything, I try to measure how everyone is feeling all the time, and then I feel this need to have everything in equilibrium. Why I feel the need to conversation conduct is beyond me. I must have volunteered for it sometime in a past life, even though nobody posted a sign-up sheet. I never used to feel this way, at least consciously. Now this increased self-awareness is useful for educational (and de-briefing) purposes but it just makes me jittery during the actual interaction.
I think I'm going to practicing shutting up more often. I think it'll be good for me. Other people might like it too.
On a related note, I'm taking pre-orders for my life epiphany book, tentatively titled, "What I learned after Ameer pinned me to the ground and shoved sleeping pills (or placebos) in my mouth. A novel."
