Resolutions

I am a creature of ritual and inane symbols. I wallow in the self created importance of little things. 

It is the eve of a new year and I stood covered in coffee grinds and sugar, rubbed vigorously into every inch of skin. Exfoliation is a necessary thing, to walk into a new year with skin that glows and where the dull layer of old is scrubbed away. 2015 was not a good year, heck it wasn't even a "nice"year. So with each sweep of my hand, a little bit of awful was sloughed off. My resolutions ran through my mind as I let the water wash over me. I needed to build a post to stake my soul to for the next 365 days. It is my twentieth year and decisions are needed to begin this decade. 

1) Read hungrily 

I haven't read as voraciously as I used to. Books are the solace we find when the world around us has disintegrated into a chaotic mess of colours and we need to retreat to the black and white again. When I walk into a bookshop I am overcome with a deep sense of serenity. It is what home feels like. So I need to feast.

2) Breathe deeply

Short shallow breathing in moments of panic must be left behind. I need to stop and appreciate life as it happens between deep breaths. 

3) Prune 

Cut away people and things in my life that do not add to my being. I'm weary of feeling like I've put too much into my relationships with people and feeling hollow after. 

4) Stop procrastinating 

I'm busy flying through typing this in the ten minutes before midnight 

5) Try, try and try again 

This is going to be a year of trying hard to make up for the mistakes and failings of this 2015.  I owe it to myself to forgo self pity and to try harder. 

I kept my list of resolutions short, because they are so full of things to be done. God I hope 2016 is a great year for all of us 

App-ocalypse : A short story about the end of the world

 Day 8

It's been a week since it happened. Everything crumbled and now people walk the streets with grey faces and empty hands. The nights are long and quiet, too quiet. The light of day is so unfamiliar, I'm used to a soft blueish glow from my screens and I've only ever gotten a tan from a sunbed  so the warm light unsettles me. Nothing and no one is safe. I feel so alone here, not sure what I should eat and if everyone around me is alive every morning. I wish I could see the sunrises and sunsets again. I feel like I didn't appreciate all the amateur photographers who had blogs full of them. No more I guess. 

There are more stars in the smoggy sky than on my Twitter. 

Day 19

I had to pay with my Marc By Marc Jacob for Marc Jacobs sunglasses to get a full tank of fuel. They don't accept any cards here at this dingy station and everyone knows carrying cash is something I wouldn't do. I've had to leave the city, there was no hotline blinging for me there. My missed calls are sitting at a thousand. The city is good for people who can do manual labour but I have a weak wrists and a deviated septum so I can't make a living there. I need to go somewhere with reception so I can promote weight loss pills on Instagram again, I made the best money then. Now, 27k people don't know what I ate for breakfast, which is just as well because I had carbs. Perish the thought. No one can see the state of my hair because my metallic ombré is washing out and I can't contact Marcel my stylist anymore. She had a child and I don't know if her clients are still giving her a 5 star rating anymore. 

There is more human kindness in this mainstream food outlet than the hearts in my notifications. I don't know where to eat anymore, all the hidden pop up resturants have gone underground and all that's left are McNuggets. I need a McHugget. Darn. That would have been such a good tweet. 

 

Day 20

I lied to myself when I left the city. I need to go back, I need to find a cronut. I need to have artisanal flour on my ciabatta. Someone offered me ice cream from a shop, I screamed because no one seems to hand churn their ice cream here. My parents don't seem affected by the disaster. They're acting like nothing happened so I had to leave and go back. My flatmate could have had a party I didn't know about. My new friend is called Iris, which is so cool because it's like Siri backwards, so I call her Siri for laughs and she thinks it's so funny. She has dementia or Alzheimer's or something I couldn't look up because she's always writing things down in a notebook. It's so vintage I die. But it probably is a medical condition because she keeps shaking and talking about a cold turkey and wanting to see Mary Jane and Milly or Molly again. Anyway I'm giving Iris a lift back to the city .

Iris has this gorgeous retro MacBook that she takes everywhere so she doesn't lose the photos that she has. She was telling me about her job, which she thought I would be able to do but I spaced out because the ocean looked like something out of Tumblr, with some amazing filter that I soon realised was my sunglasses that I ended up getting to replace my bartered Marc By Marc Jacob for Marc Jacobs sunglasses. She blogs or promoted events or something. Couldn't care about it because I just remembered what happened and I'm not sure how to carry on.

Iris wanted to try a diner but we couldn't possibly go near it because what if it had a bad Yelp review? I'm not reckless, I can't take risks like that, you know? 

I wish I had a quote to caption my pain right now

Day 22 

I keep waiting to hear a buzz. It's just my imagination. Iris checks in on me now and again through a landline, which I didn't know I had. I was out getting food from one of the few places I can remember and I saw this guy who was so orange from fake tan and he had some really intense acne, it was like pizza leprosy I die. I could never be seen in public if I got pizza leprosy.  

Imagine if pizza leprosy was a thing though? Could it be a hashtag? I don't know. oMG. I said a whole phrase when I could have been like "idk". I hate how this is right now. I'm in Starbucks and I heard a couple talking about something viral going around and I hope it isn't a cat playing the trombone because that would be so sad. I'd have a Sylvia Plath quote for how I feel about my latte (it's not pumpkin spiced, it's a Courgette Stir Fried latte), because I don't know how to feel about it. I don't know how other people feel about it. 

I keep waiting for someone to come looking for me, I feel so alone, I don't know how to contact anyone. My mother joked that I could have learned my friend's numbers. Jeez, I don't even know if people are getting older. I don't know if there are parties that I could have clicked "Interested" to. 

The world is just this vast empty place. I cannot wait for the end of this pain. I cannot endure more. 

Day 1 

Dear Diary, 

My phone broke. It's a disaster, the store says I have to wait 3- 4 weeks for a replacement. Gonna see if my parents will get me a new one before then. Ugh why is my life like this?  It's the end of the world

Sunrise

(Quite out of character, but I stayed up through the night to study. Usually sleep claims me by 1am but I felt troubled, with no inclination to shrug off my socks and climb into bed. To cut a long exposition short, I took a mat and sat out on the little balcony that overlooks some houses, hills and trees in the background, a thin line where a train sometimes runs rimming the edge of the horizon. Anyway, I was going to try to find stillness but instead I found my mind full of words. So I wrote them down.) 

When I was young I would dedicate three or four days of the year to watch the sun rise. It was my own ritual, quietly kept to read books whilst the world went dark and stars dotted the night. I would wait to see the sun rise. 

Now sunsets, oh they're glorius, thrashing wild beauties that sink gingerly into the night with the weight of the day on their shoulders. They're noisy and the song changes from cacophony to stillness. But give me a cool sunrise, the world waking up- again. 

The sky starts as a dark blue that fades softly, slowly. White but also every colour seeps in, bleeding into the morning. Lavender on the smoggy horizon, grey just by the distant outlines of pylons, rippled streaks of amber gilt the tree sihouettes. The morning songs are beautiful against the cerulean tipped sky. 

Even as your teeth begin to clatter involuntarily against the cool breeze that wraps your naked legs in goosebumps and the birds cry out at each other and the hadedas begin to screech, even as your heart feels restless because the world seems so so dark- it's ok. 

The day is new. Hope lives on. The dip in the darkness does not last. 

(My heart goes out to all those affected by the tragedies of terror. Not just Paris, but also Beirut, Nigeria, Syria, Lebanon and to any place that has been touched by the abomination that is hate masquerading as salvation. The day will be new, hope is as renewing as the sun. Sunrise will come, it always does.)

The Taboo Trifecta: Crimes at a dinner party

Unless you're  an astronaut, I don't want to hear about your job. C'est finis.

 Life is too short to spend dinner parties telling people about what you do, your banal problems at work and why you deserve a promotion. Life is too interesting to bore others with the details of your day to day activities. Unless someone loves you and asks " So how was work darling?", you don't need to actually offer up a twenty minute monologue about how nepotism and the hierarchical structure of your job prevents you from being where you should be. Tell your supervisor that, not me. 

For most, politics and religion are taboo topics. Not me, to listen to a healthy discussion about whether God is female or male or a concept created by humans to feel less alone- conversation like that is thrilling. My taboo topics are: Money, your job and "that time I sang a song with a lisp when I was 5 that my mum likes to bring up around my friends ". 

Trust me, I want to know about why you are rooted what you believe and who you would vote for because it's a reflection of you as a person. Do you agree with the ruling party's choice to withdraw from the ICC? How do you feel about nationalization? Are you pro choice? Will you agree with me when I say my uterus is my own and no Facebook raving fundamentalist can sway me to believe otherwise. 

If you ARE a Facebook warrior against abortion and feminism then I probably will have to restrain from being rude because we both know it's unfair to fire a shot when you have the upper hand (NB - if in an argument with a fundamentalist Facebook warrior- you always have the upper hand on the moral high ground of sanity) (we will tackle them further on a day when I have more time and appropriate memes). Hold onto your blinkers until the end please and thank you. 

Talk about taboo topics with me- a sex scandal that involves a religious politician is a trifecta of taboo that one only dreams of. When we veer towards the controversial ,it reveals so much more. More than your spat with Bob from Human Resources, more than the traffic at five on a Friday. 

I want to ask you about your favorite film to see if we have any common ground in our tastes. What music have you been listening to? (Note I have a kickass Soundcloud playlist of music I am dying to talk about, to someone who likes a little indie and folk ) (at some point I will Fangirl about allll my favourite artists in a post). 

If words fail you, we can just talk trash about the strange people you know who have made bad life choices (or I can deliver an anecdote in the same vein). If you don't like the arts (I once met a man at a party who declared he couldn't abide by talking about the arts so we talked about science and AI technology and the eventual rise of machines who have more sense than to let war mongering humans carry on as we do) then we can mix it up- everyone has varied interests, I keep up with innovation (thanks TED and all the cool science blogs out there )the way I keep up with the Kardashians (I am very caught up, FYI).

Tell me about your big contract or presentation and all I can define you by is your job. People who discuss their salaries - you give me actual hives.  I don't know- maybe one day when I start to work I will empathise but what I will continue to ask is - "If you're so miserable at your job, why bring it up when you aren't even there?". 

Unless you're an astronaut or someone actively pushing innovation or medicine or social problems forward, I don't actually care. Will you be remembered for your job? Meh, I won't recall much more than my stifled yawns and staring at the untouched peppers on my plate.

Posterity won't note more than the time you got too drunk at an office party and shouted out about your gripes with lower executive middle management of the company you work for. 

(All pictures do not belong to me, thanks Google).

The trouble with trilogies

 When I say "Yeah I'm a reader.", I feel guilt at having told a lie. I am not merely some girl who likes books. I binge, I fill myself up to the brim and feel the seams of my soul pull taut, as if I had overindulged at Christmas lunch. I am consumed by the pungency of short, well written novels and I become dependent on long sagas that span six or seven books. And yet, I seem to find myself having trouble with a trilogy. It seems brilliant in theory, a Beginning, a Middle and an End- right? 

It seems AMAZING! But this wonderful theory has been tainted by YA dystopian novels (amongst others). I mean I inhaled the Hunger Games, I didn't stop to breathe during Divergent and (this is the latest one I read) I flew through The Maze Runner. And in hindsight I should have stopped there! Because Second Book Slump is very real and by the last book, you end up shaking your head. I will add The Ring trilogy to this (is it dystopian? Horror? Random video tape girl haunting turns into cancer epidemic turns into existential crisis regarding the Sims) because it disappointed me. 

( I expressly exclude Lord of the Rings because Tolkien is a literary god and I can say no wrong about him)

Moving forward, the trouble with trilogies is that I feel the same ho-hum afterwards. Here is the common formula I've noticed they follow:

Book One

( Note: I am a sucker for all things dystopian after George Orwell instilled a suspicion of authority in me at age 12[ another story. Another day]. )

Protagonist lives in a post apocalyptic/ barren world after some major world event that isn't given exposition. Protagonist is a wonderful and unique daisy in a field of wheat and stands out. Goes through tribulations of some sort with a ragtag group who doesn't fully trust protagonist but hey, daisy in a wheat field people! The book ends with a victory of some kind with a betrayal of character of the protagonist. It can be resolved naturally. But wait- nothing is as it seems. The figures of authority are revealed to be more than just burocratic/mysterious bodies and instead we are given an epilogue that shocks us into NEEDING more. Book One is usually amazing. George Orwell did the right thing in stopping after one book. I didn't need to read Animal Incorporated Holdings or 1985 and I still don't. 

Book 2:

(Note: I lied. I'd probably read Animal Incorporated Holdings and 1985. That night. Off a pdf from a site that has fake reviews and weird ads about singles in my area. If I needed a single in my area, I would not be in my room with a trilogy that I know will disappoint me).

Protagonist thinks the ragtag group is safe but alas no. They must undergo more tribulations from aforementioned authority and the initial betrayal in Book One, seeps into the psyche of our hero and creates division. New environment. Some plot twists and vague information about the pre-disaster society that existed. This carries on. Yay safe again until (wait for it) another ending/epilogue that reveals a bigger organisation/threat that needs to be examined. 

Now this Second Book slump is like being promised a wonderful dinner of filet mignon and being served eggs prepared in a microwave, on a paper plate. You're angry but hungry for more.

Book Three:

(By this time, Orwell has written the final books in his two fake trilogies. 1986 and Animal Collective Enterprises and Sons are sweeping the nation as teens everywhere wonder what Snowman and NapoleonDynamite will do to avenge their fathers as the Big Sister draws in closer and begins to demolish the barn they have built their lives around. Featuring Charlotte of Charlottes Web as a spy with a heart of gold. In stores this Summer (or winter, Northern Hemisphere). In theaters soon!!!)

The tying up of loose ends- protagonist Daisy in a Wheat Field has met the outside organisation and begins to piece together what really happened. After a week or so of cooperation (ok time is relative to me here. ) they realise that the initial bad guys are just a variation of the new outside good guys. And Daisy in a Wheat Field will rebel. Hard. They go HAM and cray and whatever new food means to act out of the ordinary in an expressive way. Everyone loses someone in some tragic way and I don't cry because George R R Martin has raised me better than that, I cry for no deaths*. Not one. The final epilogue is either the dead protagonist or the protagonist as things are rebuilt and an explanation of what happened. And it's as I hit that last 20 pages that I begin to go "Wait that's it?". 

(* Christmas of 2010- I read The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks. I cried. My mother has pictures of it. That's what made my heart immune to the deaths of Sister of Daisy in a Wheat Field or the death of Daisy her/himself at the hands of scorned lover #1)

It's not that these books are by any means badly written, on the contrary- if I spent all day reading something, it's because of good writing that draws you in. (Note I didn't get through James Franco's Palo Alto, I put it down halfway (a rare act) and noted the time spent reading it was a waste of time I will need at my deathbed. I felt real sadness at the hour or so I had waded through a ghastly excuse for an examination on teenage violence and sexual misconduct. This paragraph is a jab at that collection of triggers, sexual harassment and abuse. There's a better way to grab your reader. See: Roald Dahl) What upsets me about these trilogies is the formula used.

I want to be shown the magic trick, enjoy it and then leave. Not watch the show, then realise the magicians assistant is dead and my long lost sister is actually an evil company that bankrolls aforementioned homicidal magician and then finally that nothing is as it seems- I am an experiment given to science by my parents after some huge disaster caused by the government. Yay. Yawn.

Readers deserve more. YA dystopian/science fiction could be so much more. And this is coming from someone who doesn't read that much young adult stuff, but still wants to enjoy some futuristic or magical world where Jon Snow isn't (maybe/maybe not) dead. I've read some amazing young adult books- 

The Giver by Louis Lowry was haunting. It deals with our morality and how colour and emotion plays such a huge role in it all. 

 I enjoyed Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series because it played with so many challenging themes. (Why do we believe what we do? People we are meant to trust aren't always good. The film didn't do justice (See: The Golden Compass))

The Half Bad series by Sally Green (although only two books are out) is refreshing! (Racism and witches and a boy being caught between two worlds)

The reason I loved these books is because they challenged the reader with questions about ethnics, race, religion and our own humanity. 

The trouble with trilogies is that they take one really good concept and stretch it until everyone is left with an existential crisis not unlike the one experienced on The Truman Show. If I wanted to read a bad book, I'd reread the Twilight saga and pay money for the new reworking of it with a genderbent angle (see Life and Death) (Try to unsee it) (I blame all vampire related trauma on the girls who sat near me in Grade 8). Also all these trilogies end up being four or five movies.  Which I will watch. 

Corporate America wins in the end (what does this mean?) (how can I be a Manic Pixie Dream Girl if I am ok with capitalism?) (I really want to be one) 

 [Another issue,another day] 

(None of the photos belong to me, they're the property of the publisher and authors etc)

 

Kintsugi - finding beauty in our flaws

So I took a break from writing, not the usual kind where you just don't have the time to write or it's just writers block. No I took some time where even when I wanted to write, I did not let myself. I stepped back, closed off my blog and took time to figure things out. It was better than I expected to be. 

Sometimes we need to step back, get perspective. I had to grow up a little and forgive the world for not being as pretty as I'd like it to be. Forgiveness is a powerful thing, it seeps into the cracks and gives you the healing you need. I needed that time to be angry and hurt but I also needed to remember that it was destructive to pick at scabs. I needed to learn to forgive by letting go of things things that caused resentment in me, it weighed me down and it dragged me so so deep. Often we picture our distress to be so intertwined with our psyches that we cannot imagine untangling them from ourselves. We can. 

I looked back at a lot of my older posts (deleted a few, edited some others), and it dawned on me that I forgot to see the world as beautiful despite its inherent flaws. I used to be so so passionate about my ideals and of late, I have betrayed some of them by allowing the unimportant take precedence and I allowed negativity to reverberate through my being.  

And the result of my little break (let's face it, I couldn't stay away for too long) was a bit of a change on here (notice the name that reminds us all to laugh during our cynicism) and some daisies scattered around for ambiance.I'm filled to the brim with some new things I really want to talk (read as "rant") about, laugh with you about the morbid awful side of life and generally good intentions that involve giving myself and those around me a chance. 

Kintsugi is a form of Japanese art where broken or cracked pieces of ceramic pots are repaired with gold. We need to forgive ourselves for falling down, celebrate our scars and allow our plans to change. We need to fill our cracks with gold so we don't forget that we are beautiful in spite of them. I found stillness in the melee and have started to blow on the embers that light my passion for life again. 

So, in short and basically the point of this, hello again my dear friend. It's so good to see you. 

All my love

 

Gossamer skin and brittle bones

It is life that weighs me down. It is a thousand existential crises that sparkle like stars through the night sky of my psyche. My loosened seams let the dust of my doubts spill out and I feel the glares of people who pass me in the street. They see it. The resentment of my puppet-strings makes all my movements jerky. My lips are left ribboned, bitten raw to keep from crying out. 

There was once a time when I believed in the wishes muttered below my breath. It was a time when the sight of butterflies and rain against blades of grass reminded me of God and other intricate mysteries. The fleeting realisation of a loss of this acute awareness rendered me cold and wistful. These past few months, the hollow inside of my shell has been painted with pitch and lead. I could no longer float the way I once did. No one can understand that there is no explanation for anxious thoughts at the break of day. They call it navel gazing and label it as self indulgence. Needing time to sort myself out and sew myself back together again. 

I could run to release some chemical in my brain to be happy, but then I remember that my breath escapes me for moments too long and the blood moves too slow to make up for it. This leaves whatever endorphin I desired to make it alright again, stuck somewhere between my spleen and left ear. I could soak my bones in spirits but I know that it is a betrayal to dull my emotions that run crimson and azure. It is no poultice to the soul and the dizzying loss of grip scares me. I could eat but reconsider when I stare at the darned sides of my hips that grew too quickly and the sway of my thighs that are threaded with pale skin. 

I wish my toes could let me stand en pointe, so when I felt small and clobbered together like a clay figure, I could rise a foot taller and regain a sense of being fearfully and knowingly created. I had forgotten that I had been stitched with silk and moulded by kind words. I had forgotten the rose petals from my mothers garden and poetry from my father's books, had been pressed together for my skin. My bones were not carved from glass but from the heavy boughs of oak trees rooted in time.

It was only when I had begun to resent the gossamer nature of my soul that I tried to shroud it with loud words and bind it with my sharp tongue. It has slipped my mind that every shard of my being filters light and produces rainbows, it had become so clouded over that they had stopped dancing in the morning light. It was because my fingernails were brittle like sheets of mica, that I became scared to claw my way out of this niche I made for myself.

It should be tattooed to my wrist to be still, lest I forget that I have journeyed so far. I should paint on my eyelids words like "Remember " and "Savour" so my moments are appreciated in their wonderful brevity. My ears should be pierced with hope and self belief so they filter out words that hurt me. My lips coated in honey so I start speaking sweet words. 

I feel hollow inside, needing adornments to remind me of who I am. And perhaps I will need them for a while longer.  

Staring: A short story

Her voice haunted his nights and his days stretched out until he saw her again. She smelled different each time she was in his arms, however brief those moments were. She never stayed long enough. Leaving behind vanilla and spice and flowers and all the notes between that he tried to remember.  Loving her was a welcome torture. 

The numbers and letters that filled the glowing screen at his desk were a distraction until the evening. He was not usually lax but today was different. They didn't see each other often, he barely knew what she did during the day and she never seemed to ask what he did. He wondered if she cared. But he knew she could not ignore  the surges of intensity when their eyes met. Before she looked away shyly. She did it every time. 

He knew he could be so much more. To her, to everyone. If only it wasn't so difficult. He had done everything right and now he felt as if it had come to nothing. Money and power were cold mistresses when your heart  was longing for a mere second against her lips. Those lips that she often bit nervously and those lips that broke into a smile now and then. Nothing mattered except the way tendrils of her hair curled near the nape of her neck. All was meaningless if she did not have a part in it.

The buzzing phone broke his reverie. A message flashed onto the screen:

        Received at 8:19 - Hey :) Miss you We still on for tonight right?

        Sent at 9:27 - Hi. Just busy at work right now,yes tonight is still as planned. Call me when you get                                    .                           there okay?        

       Received at 9:28 - Will do, I love you. 

       Sent at 10:03 - I know. I have to go. Bye.

                                             ___________________________________

"Someone looks especially happy today."

" No, well yes. I just get happy when I see a text from him. He's back to his old self again. He made plans for tonight!"

"Everything getting better? I knew it would, you can see how devoted he is to you."

" His job is getting better, I was worried, you know? Because he was so distant during the beginning and then it got better eventually. But when he proposed it almost made sense that he was waiting for it to be stable for us. It feels right, you know? It explained away all my worries that he wasn't in love and actually revealed how he kept the proposal a huge surprise for me."

"What are you two doing tonight then?"

" I think it's dinner, with some of our friends so we can officially break the news about the wedding."

"Haven't you done it yet?"

" Just with my family and of course you. He wanted to tell them personally, they're practically his family."

" You're just so lucky. And patient! I would not last as long as you did with a secret like that."

"It's been a week, not that long? Don't you have a deadline to meet?"

"Oh crap, that's not today is it? Don't answer that."

"I would be working if I were you. Go." 

 

                                             ___________________________________

The long snake of cars moved slowly in the dying light. He wouldn't be late but the prospect thereof worried him. That he might miss a second of her. This had to be love, even if he couldn't say it. Or madness, this craze that followed his heart into the dark shadows. He could face the world again after she smiled at him. She didn't seem to grasp how he immensely he loved her. 

His phone was silent as he entered the resturant, but he saw her through the crowd anyway.

                                             ___________________________________

"Hi, you're earlier than expected," her voice cut through the noise," Everyone said they're going to be late. Which I expected given.. I mean it's a Friday, nightmare on the road?"

"It's hellish," he scrambled for a joke to make but came up short, "It's the agony of waiting an hour and moving slower than the pedestrians." 

She laughed and his heart soared. 

He leaned in as she stood and walked toward him. The embrace was over before he realised it began. Today she smelled like coffee and lilacs. Her hair was up and a few stray curls framed her face, he caught himself staring. "I beat traffic today. I guess I was lucky," His tie was out of place here, he loosened it and attempted to pry it off, "I'm overdressed."

"Can I help there? You don't have to take it off, work clothes are what everyone will probably be in."

 She leaned over and reached up.How could he refuse?

Everyone started to arrive and each time she stood, he caught himself gazing up at her. His phone buzzed. They were all there. They had all been there when he first met her. An age passed and someone stood up to propose a toast. His phone buzzed again. He ignored it. It started to ring, he excused himself.

The voice that greeted him was dulled by the wind that blew as he walked outside, "Hi darling, I know I'm late. Sorry. This traffic is a nightmare. Please carry on without me. I will be there after the Big Announcement however."

"What announcement?"

"Oh I'm so careless! It's.. Well you will find out soon, I guess? I love you. Will be 15 minutes, okay? Darling? Just tell them to carry on, she shouldn't wait for me because I know... "

"Okay... I have to go. Bye"

He looked toward the table again, where she sat smiling. She started laughing as a story was told to the table by his best friend who sat next to her.  It was only when he sat down that he noticed a ring on her finger.