Late on a frosted, January afternoon in 2006, three people very much eager, and very much in need of healing, sat down at a table in an almost-no-name café, in a city none of them had been to before.
“It’s like our Alexandria.” One girl said, wringing her hands anxiously on the table before her, a taut smile playing briefly on otherwise plain features.
The world would never again be quite the same as it had been, earlier that day.
The youngest of them was a short, frail boy barely yet eighteen, who housed a thousand years in his eyes and shielded his face with hand whenever someone so much as raised their voice around him. The second was a girl who spoke in books and songs so obscure that few recognized enough of her references to realize that the literature, and the music, was her crutch. The fortress that kept out the universe. The eldest was a woman in her mid thirties, a dark eyed dove fallen from a distinguished position in a powerful business, back down into the financial straits of divorce and inner-city living. She was the quietest, sitting at the far end of the table while the younger two, each so freshly hatched from school and family life, both more acquainted with one another than she was, laughed nervously to one another.
The conversation had not died immediately… no, they had been there at least a half hour… chatting, idly, about this and that. Their home towns. What they’d been doing when they all met one another the first time. How much things had changed. How excited they were, excited, to finally be together again. How good things were going to be … now.
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