marcromyjos

ME.
I'm not ready because my bangs have not grown out.
I can never be in psychic territory and that's unfortunate.

Maybe my hand, nose or knee is sad. Any of those which can't articulate what's bugging.

The day I avowed my ability to read minds I had been met by something like subtle rebuke, because I was not to be trusted. As Daniel was a scream of raw nerves he disbelieved every piece of bad news. That included me and what would be my unlimited forays into his perverseness, which he ascribed to his upbringing even as he had started perfecting it in the university. That was the time of dissipating all his energies in hexagonal turns, floating in his delusions of bee efficiency and harmony with all the apparatuses of an engineer, excepting a moral compass. He had joined a frat, gotten blind drunk, failed to send letters back home and left his girlfriend waiting at the lobby of the common dormitory to be picked up by another resident. In the space of a tawny November day he was in shambles. And that was his turning and my entry point, even if I did not exist for him at that time, because the fateful day traced a nondescript career that would eventually match mine.

"I could read minds," I declared one day, twisting my leg round a cafe stool that wobbled at my shiftyness. My knees were perpetually locked in a tight corporate bind, because the corporate skirt was the rough equivalent of a corset, damning and unwieldy, that the legs struggled.

"That's bull. What am I thinking?"

"Why. Are your own thoughts as interesting to you as they are to me?"

"What made you say that then?" This fear of me that Daniel had was nothing more than a niche fear---he had assigned fears for places. This cafe, at 6:00 p.m., for instance, was unbecoming for an impression of productivity. For one, we were a couple of shabby imports from Makati, and the residents this side of town really drank unsweetened coffee. We haven't gotten around associating cafes with coffee, even less with work after the hours, and that fires up Daniel's regressive self-consciousness. He folded and unfolded the sleeves of his shirt, drummmed his fingers on the table and glanced at the people coming in and buttonholing each other. The cafe itself was suffering fools like us who fell for its fluorescent clarity and the affable intonations of the baristas who dished out the drinks less sloppily than would have been comfortable. At the pretext of output we had gone in, flinching at the collegiate tableau and a smattering of laptops, puckish kids in shorts and adults conversing with heads at rigid distances.

"Cut the crap," Daniel groaned. "You were telling me something."

"I'm telling you I could read your mind."

"And I'm interested in what I know," he said flatly.

"You could first think to read my mind," I offered, feeling bored.

"How does one do that? Why can't I do that?"

"Simple," I raised my head. "You don't read at all."

(to be continued...)