stories for strangers

I.  [penny]

she’d spent the last two hours alternating between throwing her phone on the bed after texting her best friend phil (the one who’d set her up on this not-blind-but-very-much-arranged date as some sort of distraction from his own didn’t-get-into-the-right-grad-school slump) & throwing castaway clothes into the cotton sea around her ankles, all in search of something to wear on this date – they’re just going to noodles & company but it’s only the first date & her mom is all concerned about whether she’s wearing mascara but she doesn’t really feel like she needs to impress him even though she probably should since it’s only the second time they’ve ever met – letting her mind wander to all of the places you shouldn’t let your mind go before a first date, like that place where the inside of her forehead becomes a drive-in movie for her frontal lobe, playing that moment in when harry met sally where harry word-vomits this list of weird things he loves about sally on a loop, & this internal cinema gets her thinking about what oddities this guy she’s only met once might eventually love about her, what his list of weird things might entail – maybe he won’t be able to help laughing at the way she eats apples from the bottom up, left with just a stem & a few seeds; perhaps he’ll begin to fall for the way she makes up stories for strangers she’ll never know (like why the parents of the child in her sunday school class had named the kid juniper); he might learn to love laughing with her when she can’t contain her giggles at the sight of a frantic chicken; or maybe he’ll have to hide his grin whenever he’s forced to comply with her request to watch the princess bride, just one more time; or could it be that he’ll soon be smitten with the wordy way she described her taste in music (basically it’s any song that you’d hear during a video montage, the kind shot with a super 8, of a summer road trip through the mountains, with shots of the sun blinking through aspen trees & of your best friends laughing in the back seat & around the campfire & as they plummeted from a cliff into the watery depths below); it might be that he’ll adore her habit of carrying four moleskine notebooks everywhere: one for thoughts, one for prayers, one for inspiration, & one for secrets; or maybe he’ll fall head over heels & madly in love with the way that she recognizes all of these quirks in herself, filling her filing-cabinet brain with lists of all the weird ways she views the world - or maybe [& most likely], he won’t fall in love at all, not even remotely, with her or any of her quirks (because this is, after all, just the first date & he might not want to see her ever again & she might even feel the same aversion), & she’s spent the last ten minutes of her life wondering about things that won’t happen & quirks he won’t love when she really should have been finding the combination (her sister’s black sundress that still had the tag on, a dusty pink cardigan, & her favorite leather sandals) that eloquently said “i tried really hard to make it look like i didn’t really try at all & give you the impression that i always look so effortlessly lovely.” 

II. [mitch]

he’d gotten to noodles ten minutes early because he’d figured that it’d look bad if his date got there before him – not in the wow-i-hate-your-guts sort of bad but more of the okay-so-being-on-time-wasn’t-totally-important-to-you sort of bad – & now found himself, staring at the menu looming on the wall in front of him, waiting for the girl he’d met a just once & just a few weeks before when she was home on spring break (from a college in a state that he knew started with ‘m’ but he couldn’t actually remember which one) & they’d both attended their friend’s senior recital in the city – she knew phil from high school, maybe – where she’d somehow ended up sitting in the middle of a row full of phil’s friends from college & somehow next to him & they talked about taco bell etiquette & what life would be life as a professor of czech culture & whether or not he should shave his beard - he had shaved since, but had also definitely felt some small twinge of regret for doing so since the girl he’d met just once just a few weeks ago had told him not to, that it was just fine [which at first seemed offensive but no, not fine in the way people use it now, she’d said, like just-okay or not-quite-good-not-quite-bad but fine in the way people say fine-dining, the way the word’s defined in the dictionary: good, acceptable, satisfactory], but a few days later he’d done it anyway because in all honesty he’d thought she’d always be that girl he’d just met once before phil texted him to say that the prospect of destiny had inspired him to set the pair up on a date because each of them had mentioned meeting the other post-recital & phil had heard them talking & her laughing on his recital recording (but phil definitely wasn’t mad about it because, destiny), but now here he stood, just inside the door at noodles with a clean shaven face & no clue what to order since he’s never been to noodles before & had zero ideas about what to order (pesto? mac & cheese? spaghetti?)

III. [both, waiting]

so there he was, waiting for the girl who’d thought his beard was just fine, & as he thought about the battle between the true & colloquial meanings of fine he saw her, there, standing across the street waiting to cross, waiting to walk through the first & the second glass door, waiting to come into noodles & see him waiting for her as she stood across the street in a black dress & a pink sweater & brown sandals, waiting for the small man made of white lights to say it was okay to proceed, to cross the street, to walk through the first & the second glass door, to come into noodles & re-meet the guy she met just once, the guy who’s beard she thought was just fine, to apologize for being just a little bit late – the parking around here is absurd –

to hear him accept her apology,

to hear him tell her not to worry,

that she’s just fine.