Maybe tomorrow.

His foot is shaking under the table. His soul is shaking under his skin. It’s his default state, unsatiated, unsettled. Raging, always raging. His insides are twitching with every kind of lust, even now, as we speak. The conversation is flying too fast to stick to pages.

The kid has too much life for so small a frame. It’s only natural his lines would blur as it all swirls needily about in search of a form, in search of some release. His pores are struggling to keep it all contained.

His finger is tap tap tapping on the skin behind his ear where a pen rests, his head perched down toward the table in front of him. The bony fingers on his other hand are toying nervously with a cigarette as the cup of black coffee sits two thirds empty in front of us. It’s cold. His loose and tattered neckline reveals a skinny boy’s pale collar bones, and above, his long face, framed by the dark and scruffy signs of the always distracted.

He carries his weight with an orphan air; a lone child drifting about in a ceaseless search for his tribe, and undeterred by the faint underlying fear that he may be the sole of his kind. Jack Kerouac meets Le Petit Prince.

Maybe next time. Maybe tomorrow.

Maybe…that girl?

Yeah…maybe…I’m up from the table to go order a café au lait, and as I’m counting my change at the counter, I turn to see his pen out in his hand and his torn notepad lying flat on the table. Cheap, top spiral, tiny lined pages. The better to rip them out. His free hand is pulling violently at his hair as he scribbles in code with the other, his glassy blue eyes sporadically surfacing for air. He doesn’t notice me staring.

“Um, here. Thanks.” I take my change and coffee and head back over to the table, giving the packet of sugar a quick shake as I take my seat. I smile at him and hold it a moment. He smiles back, his eyes fall.

“She’s pretty,” I say.

“Yeah…”

His eyes are always facing inward, exploring new corners of his own inner world. It’s a beautiful world he’s crafted, almost vaguely familiar, with its own internal logic, its laws and maps, its kings and queens. Like some place we’ve all known but have long since left behind. They said we had to.

Don’t ask him to translate though, he won’t understand. Like a castaway from a faraway galaxy shipwrecked here millennia ago, who’s forgotten he’s not of this land; or that he’s vearing off into a pitch unknown to the human ear.

And this hollow, hardened world is not meant for his kind.