This coffee house contains a million stories. You only have to look around but you won't. Eyes averted draw to close a more strangled relationship than the ones you'd find -- we don't need to travel these roads to their ends. They exist for us in the tension in this air, and that is enough. The hair that called her Cassandra a month ago, has spun a darker brown since our paths last crossed. Now she's "Cassie," "Cass," she's a girl whose presence implies a vacillation. I only ever watched her from afar. The limp pillow-cusions fold the chair into a skirt, a dressing to some object more apparent, while the glasses that conceal an intelligence you never expected eye the surroundings (save you).

I love fireplaces that have been closed in, a reference to a time past, the immediacy of the quick flame rising has been covered by the everpresent but unnoticed system of our construction, the snakes that thrust vapors through pipes warmed by coals a thousand miles off. The distance of this sealed fireplace plugs her ears, covers my eyes, confuses that boy's touch. We don't even see one another, captivated by the mangled sound of a silent furnace, and a new smoke that rises unperceived.

And so the chair sits empty, the pillows flung floorward and unused. There's a man walking up the stairs and he gazes around quickly, decisively, acclimating himself to this new scene. Every face is always a disappointment (if unkonwn). Every face is unrest. The man upsets his own whims, his fantasies of friends and long lost lovers scorned: All of them could be sitting on the plush couches of the second floor of a coffee house, right?

The walls are painted with one coat and the ceiling timbers are exposed. This room is halfway put together and its unquestionably the way we like it. So are we. The kids skip over from university and put on airs, claim they know the world. A boy, a mere boy of seventeen, knows nothing, cannot, as he peers over the the screen of his computer and watches their lazy progression through dense textbooks, fields of knowledge, pools to worlds from which he's barred.

It's always disappointment, the look, the contrivance. No one can just read a book anymore.