The young man at the next table is evangelizing
to another young man.
He is arguing we might live in a simulation.
Something about light not behaving intuitively.
He’s on to Lazarus and The Screwtape Letters now.
And I didn’t bring my headphones.
Outside, I watch boys hang loose as marionettes
on a dying earth beneath a dying sun.
And I worry about war and fundamentalism.
I’m sick of dialectic dialogue.
The young man has moved on to talking about Fight Club
(which is something you’re not supposed to talk about),
misquoting the book and film,
talking about a purposeless struggle.
And I marvel at a belief system cobbled together
hodge-podge from religious texts and pop culture.
Probably not so unlike my own.
Of course you are here.
I don’t have my headphones to block you out.
Well, you aren’t here-here (I mean, could you imagine?),
but you’re here the way I don’t notice my legs until they ache,
or my stomach until I am hungry, or my heart until it’s breaking.
You are hiding in every poem I write and every story I tell,
every journal entry and not far from every thought.
(God, now he’s talking about love and his divorce
and I feel pangs of sympathy and guilt.)
He says to the other young man:
Let me ask you this.
Let me ask you this.
But the questions are all rhetorical,
simply there to further his points.
I sip the weakest tea I’ve ever had and it hurts my stomach
as bad as the sympathy and guilt,
but the barista said she’d try better if I wanted a refill
and I’m trying not to be rude.
And of course you are here.
Textured tile covers the face of the coffee bar
and it looks inside out the longer you stare at it,
like an idea, like a simulation of a coffee bar.
And there is a father playing Go Fish with his daughter
trying to ignore the young man talking now
about the difference between the sexes
and how dating is really like sales if you think about it.
And of course you are here.
Matthew Roy (he/him) lives in the American Midwest. He’s moved from a small town to a big city, from a rambling farmhouse to a small apartment, and from a major corporation to an up-and-comer. He’s writing more. He’s making changes. He’s querying his first novel and banging away at his second. His work has appeared in Eternal Haunted Summer, Haven Spec, Illumen Magazine, Penumbric Speculative Fiction Mag, The Quarter(ly) Journal, Space & Time Magazine, The Sprawl Mag, star*line, Twenty-two Twenty-eight, untethered magazine, and So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library, among others.
Header photography and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson
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