Reading Kafka

The F train could have been the N and R train. You could have been wearing sweat pants, not a dress. It was pure luck I spotted you across the way – both of us reading Kafka. I tapped lightly on your shoulder as I passed. And though we’ve come to understand that we disagree about everything, that evening we agreed on a course of action: coffee, black.

It was a purplish evening and you kept saying that the moon was a womb, the birth place of stars. Like when you try to eat a bowl of soup when they give you a pair of chopsticks – I laugh like that. I shouldn’t have laughed, but I ached with wanting you and didn’t know what else to do.

The memory of us is beautiful to me. And though I’m expressing myself badly, I just want to remind you how it used to be when we quarreled like lovers, unlike the invisible fights we have now where it seems you’ve slipped beyond my reach, as if you’re tuned to another frequency. The knowledge of how far we’ve drifted has grown gradually in me, like a philosopher who reads Kafka again and again until suddenly he understands it for the first time.