The legendary girl

I am sitting in a curry store in a town I used to love. A lot seems to have changed. It’s like “they” love to kill it, the breath of the town, its smell, and turn it into anything else. Why though? I don’t understand. Why do “they” love anything but what is? Why must “they” muffle everyone’s mouth and force them to say what’s not? And feed us what “they” want instead of what we love? They build generic towns everywhere, to the point that we lose the meaning of going anywhere. Anything is everywhere, so why bother?

Despite all this, the curry was alive. Good for it.

I’m not as innocent as I might wish, of course. Fast forward, and now I’m sitting in a generic, stylish café found all over the world. I regularly eat at food chains because it’s tiresome to look for a new place. And I like the invisibility, I like that no one cares who I am; I feel free to pretend to be anyone else. Because I am anyone else. So I am part of this ordeal, as is everyone else. We invest in the world we create. The world is the art of our decisions.

Today, I met a girl I used to know well. My tail wiggled at the sight of her, I noticed because it doesn’t happen often. I asked if she remembered me. She said, “Yeah, I think so.”

I pulled out a note from my pocket and told her, “You’re a legend.”

She smiled. “Why?”

I said, “Remember when you used to complain about how tricky rounding numbers was?”

She nodded.

“So I told you, ‘Any number below four, you can drop. Any number above five, you’ve gotta round up.’ You thought that sounded easy, and I asked you to try rounding 124. You said, ‘I got it!’

When I asked the answer, you said, ‘Zero!’”

We both laughed. She seemed to remember that moment too.

We were comrades, speaking the same language. I got to talk to her briefly again. She asked, “Are you around here every week?” I smiled and said no. It was a coincidence, more of a mistake. I’d completely forgotten about the appointment I had with another person and didn’t notice the flood of messages coming into my phone. But I guess it was a mistake gone good. I got to meet my legend. And I was reminded of the kind of experience I live for. A wagging kind. A kind of tale that wags your imagined tail, I’m a fortune tailer. My tails tells tales better than me. No pun intended. (This is a lie)