Years Ago My Friend and I

Years ago my friend and I sat outside a café in the bright shine of early spring.

“What were you thinking?” he said, a question he had not asked in months.

We had been sitting there silent, near motionless, looking anywhere but at ourselves, for a long time.

Pedestrians strolled by in their winter coats.

Being together in the city had felt less and less like belonging and more like happenstance, a random flutter to the universe. We had mistaken who we were. Soon we would part.

“I was talking to that pigeon,” I said. A pigeon waddled closer to my chair, veering in spurts to one side and then to the other.

“What did it say?” Such tenderness. If only….

“I said: ‘You there! You have a very small brain.’

“And it said to me: ‘But if my brain were any larger, I wouldn’t be able to bob my head so wonderfully.’”