2.

The food took too long to come. She was impatient. She had a small appetite but was always hungry. Whenever she had an idea, she got terribly hungry, too. She had an idea now. She got up and started walking around the empty café. She went up to the neon letters spelling N-E-P-O in the window as if to see where the red came from; she touched the O and withdrew, making the sound and shape of a O as she wove around the round tables, adjusting the mustard dishes with their little silver spoons sticking out like tongues. She didn’t look over to me, though it would be wrong to say that she was uncurious. She was confident, insouciant, petulant. She was always hungry and never filled up.
I wanted to tell her something, something probably terribly important, but I couldn’t. I grabbed her shoulder as she passed me, weaving, adjusting. She shrugged, turned around and took me in with her low laugh, ominous and arbitrary. She turned and walked back to the window, lifted the glass of milk she’d left there and held it in her hands, still, white on white. “A list of things that the sea does” she quoted, “is not what the sea is.” It ticked off her tongue like a lesson that someone had once written on a blackboard, somewhere. Sometimes I would watch her from this window as she left – sometimes I would even follow her outside and walk behind her until the corner, sometimes further – and think of the fine nature of those beautiful wing-like shoulder-blades that always shrugged me off.