MR. MAGIC EIGHT EYES

PT. 1 - DINNER

Last night, I had dinner with Mr. Magic Eight Eyes.

He eats slowly. He is reserved with his own appetite. His mouth is boyish, reduced, and belly-buttoned-up. The lips twist and curl inward as if retreating cautiously. I wonder if this is his tell — Am I calling his bluff? What cards does he hold? I am afraid that I will look over and break my neck. I am afraid that his cards are blank, a cold, staring white — nothing to tell at all, nothing to bleed. 

In red, tomatoey splotches his cheeks turn, and I cannot determine — between his plateaued brows — whether I render him embarrassed, speechless, or annoyed, or all of these at once. I repeat to myself, He’s just a guy, a boy, a man, but I know that my observations will splinter into spiraling offshoots. Hypotheses about the women who’ve kissed those lips before, and whether those women were as thin as I, and whether they moaned loudly when they came, and whether he could even make them do so in the first place. But then again, just a guy, a boy, a man. 

He is silently stubborn. Tempered, like a scale so weighted on both sides it collapses to neutrality. He achieves nonchalance by reminding himself, the woman he’s eating dinner with, and everyone and their mother, that he is very definitely nonchalant. 

All his thoughts and sentences are clipped slightly, a young word too short. He is impossible, frustrating to read, and I’m convinced it’s the brows. They lay like two lines waiting for signatures, a bit lonely, not willing to budge. They do not tolerate, yet I get the sense that they carry what the rest of his body cannot. His shoulders, the rounded blades, peel inward. He’s already shrinking at 6 feet tall; he does not want to be an imposition. But in this reduction, this tempering, I see a sad man. 

Not pathetic one, but one who suffers, quietly.