Dear girl who sat alone in the café,

After having just spent an hour and a half with you and your probing ideas, roaming eyes from the back of the class resting way too often on the space around my head, seeing you sitting there by yourself came as a shock, and for a second my heart stopped as I walked past and pretended not to have seen you. Just my luck, you looked up just then and half-smiled in a way which left me wondering whether or not it was sincere. You looked lonely with your ancient, dusty copy of 1984 - ‘It’s goes on and on and on and it never ends!’ - but I felt awkward hovering. I told you I had to order, I was famished, and escaped with relief. Only I remembered at the counter I was there to share just a pot of tea with a friend, and hoped you’d leave before we did so as not to foil my brilliant (my one and only!) escape-awkward-situations-line.

I almost asked who you were with, before noticing the absence of a coat over the back of the other chair. I used to think people who sat alone in cafés were desperate, friendless people, until I did the same just last weekend on what Jules might call an Alone Day. It was getting dark at least three hours too early, I was miserable and soaking wet with numb toes and only just £1.70 clinking loosely in my coat pocket. On impulse I dived into Café Java and installed myself on a stool at the tall table running the walls of the place, with a frothy hot chocolate and an article in some women’s magazine on a long distance relationship - a woman in Oxford writing in about her relationship with a Cossack, and her train trips to Russia once a year. I came out thinking, that wasn’t too bad, I still have friends, I’m not desperate. 

Anyway, I realised with a start that the violet shading over your left eyelid is not pretty purple eyeshadow, but a bruise. I was inches away from asking, when I remember the way you said ‘Kodak moment!‘ sarcastically like that to the lecturer who asked why we sat huddled over mugs in an office when the rest of the group were beavering away on the macs, capturing and logging and dissolving one shot into another.

You are very intriguing. I can’t decide whether or not I like you, and I think you should definitely stop staring at me like that.