Line, A Minor Key

Lines, a Minor Key

by stacie sexton

Things are linear. Things move along straight lines. Yet they have an overwhelming ability to become dynamic and reroute themselves. Of course, this movement can only be seen within the context of one’s mind, just beyond the point where the sun sets heavy and the coffee cups sit empty upon the dinner table.

Things are linear the way most things are also beautiful. A girl with an awkward posture might never find solace in the mirror of her mother’s gaze, but a new day dawns when the jarring lilt of a revered soprano escapes from her cautious mouth. Exactly, and rightly so, in the manner that one might find three quarters at the bottom of the washing machine after neglecting to do the laundry for almost a month’s time.

Things become dynamic when someone just happens to overhear conversations swirling around and tap dancing quite loudly in the first booth of the café. Maybe cigarettes are involved. A sinfully indulgent slice of cheesecake is almost always to be implicated as an accomplice. The throughline is formed, held tightly in the frontal lobe, the seat of logic and reason, the forefront of the human brain, the height of evolution. Something incredibly strange happens almost immediately. Synapses fail and chemicals drop. Trust is established. Two friends awash in the glow of anticipated confession prepare for a testament to the fragility of human logic and morality and something else, probably. Something undefined.

It was something else most certainly and the girl in the first booth of the café told the other girl in the first booth of the café that she was in love. Real true burning love, like the kind that people pay ten dollars to see in movie theaters. The girl told the other girl that people don’t live through this kind of love. They feel it and they eat it and they hold it and they sleep it. They stop thinking about anything else. They become an entirely different creature, as if the love itself had risen from the ashes of the Phoenix and burned parallel with a new fortitude and purpose.

The girl told the other girl about love. The waitress heard it all but didn’t really care. An old man sitting at the bar with his daily crossword and egg sandwich laughed softly to himself and felt shame for hearing any of it at all. He thought about his wife and his children. He thought about how he used to return home after a long day at work to find that his home had never really been a home at all. He used to burn so brightly, night and day, from each steady breath to the next, and for every glorious second since the day they first met. She never could find that terrible little spot in her brain that would make her love him like he loved her. Synapses failed and chemicals dropped. She married him anyway.

The old man settled his bill and slipped out of the café, the same way he did at the same time every day.

The story is to be expected. Children arise with the dawning of a new day to find answers to questions they didn’t know they were asking. Grown-up people operate with outdated infrastructure, looking for questions to fit the answers they didn’t take the time to recycle. Knowledge and power, cyclical in nature, find their way back to the straight line as the masses scream about death and taxes, death and taxes, death and taxes. They never scream about love. They never tell the poor girl in the first booth of the café to just shut up already. They never tell the old man about the notion of eternity or literally anything that might restore his faith in something besides nothing.

Then, we all move collectivist while merging and defining absolute value and trying to refold that road map in a proper way. Trying to knot that bow tie before the wedding march begins to blare through the DJ’s speakers. We draw lines in the sand and none of them are particularly interesting.