#56
We’re at Cafe Lux in the center of Copenhagen. My friend M is telling me something about his latest trip — acid? LSD? Mushrooms? I can’t remember, even if he’s still in the middle of the story. I’m more focused on the woman sitting alone reading at a table near the windows. What is she thinking? How is she so focused on such a beautiful day on such a beautiful square in such a beautiful city?
I’d been distracted for years, months, days, weeks, hours, minutes, seconds — it was my default state of existence. I got rid of anything that bothered me including my iPhone. That was the first to go. I have one of the last landlines and I bought an old answering machine that I check when I get home. No emergencies have ever taken place that I’ve not been able to manage since.
M was going on about the end of the trip, how he came down off it and how it changed his life. “I’ve heard this all before” I told him, because I had. Each time we meet here, each time he tells me how it changed his life, each time he goes off to do it again. “This time it was monumental”, he cries.
Somehow I doubt it. But who can know for sure.
The woman gets up to leave. She’s tall, her hair is long and black and straight, she’s wearing a dark blue wool skirt to her ankles with a burgundy red turtleneck sweater which accentuates her length. The black leather boots add to her height. Her purse is simple, but expensive, that you can tell, and her makeup is understated, enhancing her cheekbones. Is she a model? Maybe she’s too old to be one. She leaves cash on the table, adjusts a scarf around her neck, dawns sunglasses and quietly, with grace, exits into the rush of the afternoon in the square out front.
I can see her through the large windows cross the square diagonally, and turn right, down one of the smaller streets. The one with the Louis Vuitton and Gucci and Dior.
M notices. “The same woman”, he asks. “I think so”, I say.
I pay for the coffee as I usually do, shake M’s hand. We leave and he takes off on his bike, and I wander towards the Dior, the Gucci, the Louis Vuitton street with nothing particular in mind, with no where to be, with no idea what I’m going to do.