Ten-Minute Writing - January 15, 2019

​He noticed her. How could he not? Her wispy blonde hair blew off and around her shoulders in the light breeze that brushed along the busy inlet in the warm afternoon. The golden sparkle of the blue-green water matched the sun's glint off of her hair. She was tan, but not obsessively so, and the way she held the mug in two hands as if she were sitting outside an Aspen coffee shop in November, instead of early May in Sounders Beach, was so damn cute. He couldn't keep his eyes off her. As much as he tried to concentrate on anything else--the menu, the adorable little girl at the table next to him waving her hands at a butterfly, a motor boat idling nearby--he kept glancing back at the woman. Then away. Then back at her, once again.

Christ, what's the matter with you? he thought. She's going to think you're some kind of stalker, just another wannabe monied guy in town to scam chicks out of their alimony, and their panties. But that wasn't it for him. He saw something in her face. Something the wire-rimmed Janis Joplin sunglasses couldn't hide. A pain. She had been there. The kind of place where adults find themselves, even when they've tried a lifetime to avoid. That cavernous pit of hurt that takes what seems like forever to climb out of after someone you've given every bit of your heart and soul and body and mind and breath to has tossed it away so haphazardly and callously that you question every relationship, no matter how shallow or deep, brief or long-running, transient or significant, for the rest of your life.