An Untrue Story That Definitely Didn’t Happen To Me
It was the perils of straying too close to my hometown, and the hometown of my first love, I suppose, which changed me from down-on-my-luck to extremely-down-on-my-luck in the matter of a second, or slightly less. It was freezing out, one of those days when a combination of icy rain and a wind that seemed to cut through even the thickest coats dropped your body temperature to something barely above freezing, almost as soon as you stepped outside. It was also one of those days when events conspired to keep me outside for a disproportionate amount of time, flitting between depressing appointments and frustrating meetings.
It was in one of the gaps between these meetings, gaps just slightly too long to be necessary and slightly too short to do anything particularly meaningful with, that a day which had already verged on the suicide-inspiring managed to plunged to an unforeseen new nadir. I had installed myself beneath a heating vent in some hellish chain coffee franchise, hands clenched around a mug whose warmth was far more appealing than its acrid contents, as I tried to stop a shivering that seemed to emanate from somewhere inside my bones, and was watching the second hand drive time forward, inexorably towards my next appointment.
I’d been sat there some twenty-five minutes, my hands glowing pink and raw with heat leached unceremoniously from the unwanted drink, assiduously avoiding eye-contact with anyone who looked even vaguely happy, to avoid unwanted and unwarranted bitterness. Checking the time on my phone, I forgot that the coffee was mainly a prop and took a sip, spitting it back out before the taste and cold could settle on my tongue. I turned to check the weather through the window, hoping that the rain at least might have abated. Instead I saw her, the last person I wanted to see when life and luck had brought me so low, and attempted to duck out of sight.
Attempted, I say being unflatteringly precise, because in the urgency of the movement I neglected the proper motion necessary to duck beneath a table and instead simply bent sharply at the waist, bringing my forehead into violent collision with the table. This action, my blasphemous cry of pain, and the resultant clatter of scattered crockery; to wit, one mug of thankfully-lukewarm coffee, a saucer and a not-quite empty milk jug, had the effect of drawing the entire rooms instant attention, somewhat counter to my initial intent, as I reeled in disorienting pain.
I doubled over again, less extremely, and clutched my forehead as I engaged in some analgesic profanity, panacea for both for the pain and the imminent social discomfort, realising too late that a feigned faint, either as the cause or the result of the initial head-table collision, would have offered an out. Albeit a slightly emasculating out. Instead I had sealed my fate, and even the dragged-out seconds of rocking back and forth in pronounced pain with my eyes affixed on the scene of the offence, could not last forever. “Thom?”, she asked in apparent concern.
Or, you know, she said some other name…
