He. sits at the table in the smoke filled coffee house watching. Watching the people come and go. He sees the young, grunge-bunny girls with their multi-colored pig tails and their pierced faces, and he feels nothing. He sees men walking hand in hand with other men, laughing, talking, touching with casual intimacy and feels nothing.He sits all day and well into the night watching while the smooth, young, up-and-coming corporate crowd fades into the colorful, neo-hippie, herbal tea-drinking, psuedo-intellectuals, sitting in small groups, arguing in muted tones the finer points of the philosophy of Bugs as opposed to that of Karl Marx over under-sized cups of over-priced espresso, and still he feels nothing.

He examines the colors around him. He loves the greens, and blues and stop-sign reds of the girls that surround him, occasionally brushing his arm or his shoulder as they slip past. Sometimes he thinks he would like to reach out and touch them. To grip the swirling colors tightly in his fist until they were still. Until they swirled and danced just out of reach no longer. His eyes shift and dance like guttering candle flames as he watches the hands of a handsome, delicate young man caress the back of yet another lean bodied male, his lover, and he longs to be that hand, that back. His loneliness rises up inside him and his vision blurs, the dim lighting grows dimmer, the candle on his table flickers and splits into three as his eyes lose focus.

He drags his fist angrily across his eyes, impatient with this unwanted onslaught of emotion. He concentrates on the black of the night sky just outside the window, his vision shifts yet again and he finds himself face to face not with a stranger, as he had first supposed, but with himself. He drinks in the deep, liquid brown of his eyes, like coffee or melted chocolate. Notes the full lips, stained the red of the wine he has been sipping, smiles a strange, non-smile and ponders the feline beauty of this expression. He runs his tapered fingers through his soft, black hair and watches with amusement as the curls spring back to claim their space on his forehead, tumbling down around his jaw. It amuses him to think what an aggravation they must be to this fastidious man before him. His hand drops down to his face, lingering at his jaw and the carefully trimmed goatee that grows there, perched as if waiting. Waiting for what? he wonders, absently stroking the furry beast clinging to his chin.

As his eyes catch on the faint scar running the lenghth of his brow, his smile fades, disappears, replaced by a snarl at this marring of the porcelain beauty, bringing him back to an awareness of himself, as himself. Marred within and without. Angrily, he shoves back his chair and launches himself out of it, a burning arrow trying to outrun the flames.

THE END