Did they love?

My daily habits were interrupted twice today. Three times a week I settle with coffee and a copy of the New York Times, but it’s absence from the university hallways forced me to flip through an old copy of The Paris Review. As I re-read a memoir in the third floor break room, a girl sat near me on her cellular phone.

“Well, I really had fun with you these past…” she began to say. She was speaking to a male, I could tell it. “But, my family won’t go for it.”

I wondered what they wouldn’t “go for.” Was she pregnant? Was she caught into some blood war like “Juliet?” Immediately I stopped reading and started listening.

“My family doesn’t like that you live with your ex…they like got mad at me for being with you and not getting mad at you fa’ [for] that,” she said. I learned from listening that he lived in another time zone, and perhaps traveled while he worked. Perhaps it was their first time apart, since she went away to college. She told him to call her back, and unwrapped a honey bun to accompany her coffee.

I complain often to friends about my nonexistent romantic life–even as I near 23. It’s a subject I can’t let go off, nor get away from. In periods of appreciated solitude, something reminds me of a life portion that I’ve never experienced. And though the girl was near to tears, I suddenly wished that I was her. I would take it all, good and bad if it were offered to me.

At eleven I gathered my things, slipped a bookmark in the Review and started back to my English Lit class. I could hear her phone ringing as I exited the break room. He had called back.