I don’t know how I got here. I remember the events but somehow they seem so disconnected from any reality that I can comprehend.

I’m forty years old. I work in an office. I support some financial software in a large firm. It’s not a very technical role and the work is fairly dull. When I look back on my life before my divorce, it seems like a monotonous pattern of events. Work, come home, eat, shower up. Fuck sometimes. Go to sleep. Lather, rinse, repeat as the shampoo bottles say.

I barely remember her name most days. Her memory is like a photo in someone else’s house. Blond hair, blue eyes smiling up at me. But like those photos, I don’t know her. I’ve never met her.

The final papers came in the mail four years ago. I signed them and put them in an envelope with too many stamps. Not an absurd number. Maybe four. I stuffed the envelope in one of those big blue mailboxes so it the post office wouldn’t lose it.

Three years ago, I noticed a teenager in a coffee shop. I went in that shop almost every day on the way home. The shop never seemed busy. It must have been early fall or mid spring. The sunlight had started to fade.

I don’t think anyone would have noticed her at all if the store had been busy. Maybe not even me. She had light brown skin and unruly curls. She didn’t look like my type, to be honest. I don’t mind a bigger woman but she was bigger than I thought I cared for back then. She wore flip flops and jeans that didn’t reach her ankles. Maybe they were supposed to be capris. They weren’t high end enough for that. Her shirt had gone through the wash too many times.

The barista handed me my coffee concoction and I walked in the direction of the door.

Something made me turn around. I walked up to her table. “Hey.”

She looked up. “What?”

“Mind if I sit here?”

She frowned and then relented. “Ok, I guess.”

I pulled out a chair at the opposite end of the table and sat down in it. “My name is Mike.”

“Gabriel,” she said.

I sipped my coffee. All the milk and sugar had cooled it down already.

“Do you always sit at the only occupied table when a fat ugly seventeen year old is there?” she whispered.

Her voice didn’t sound like an accusation. Maybe like confusion, fear, and anger.

I gulped. “I didn’t know you were seventeen and you’re not ugly.