Sitting on the small wooden porch at Expresso Corner on the corner of 14th and University, I sipped my jasmine tea on the crisp late fall night. September had made good on its threats and around me were a few leaves which had evaded the weekly city collections. In the wind and the traffic, they had found their way over the stone wall separating the street from the grassy lawn of the medical school, verdant even now, over the three lanes of traffic of University Avenue and to the sidewalk and brick walls of late seventies structure.
The aroma of the jasmine tea, foreign, at close distance, was barely enough to overcome the dry sweet smells of the aging oak leaves. I presently sat the tea on the table at some distance, and begged for a bus or some large truck to bring the familiar smell of diesel fuel and erase the sentimental fragrance of the falling rotten leaves, making a tea of sort themselves in the shallow and stagnant water of the concrete gutter of 14th.
I was alone tonight, unusual then, at the coffee shop. Sander was away on a date of some sort, and my friends were busy with some assignment that I could no longer bring myself to stomach. By chance, then, I fell into some rehearsed habit of hot tea and dainty dessert in the eclectic and very pretentious Corner shop. I forwent the cheesecake that evening falling prey to insecurities of my weight.
Even that night, I was drifting into nostalgia. As a child, making ‘par fumes’ from the leaves of my grandmother's oaks. My brother and I would soak them for days, very predetermined, in rain water with 'secret ingredients' to present to our mother as a gift when the brew had reached an appropriate pungency. My mother could barely force a smile, holding back a gag, as she would sample our work, and then politely set it aside to toss when our backs were turned and our minds diverted.
We whiled away summer evenings making mud pies and trinkets from the blue clay of the creek bed. The winter we prayed for snow, and built our forts and snowmen. The spring, their were the flowers, and the bugs. The autumn was about the leaves. Raking, bagging, burning... chopping them up with the mower when my dad was being lazy. And doing the same for my uncle for five dollars. I laugh now, as I did that night, at how small five dollars seems now… it couldn’t even buy the tea and pastry in front of me.
I'm not sure how many glasses of jasmine tea I finished that night. Had I chosen Earl Grey, I might have been able to blame my subsequent sleeplessness to excessive caffeine. But what kept me up that night... what drove me to the coffee shop near midnight... what had me kicking leaves in the lawn across the street only hours before, were the thoughts of a man I love on a date with someone else.
This evening, I sleep alone as yet another man I care for sleeps with another. In both cases, it’s the severe loneliness of the queen size bed, which causes me to toss and turn. It’s the beauty of the unknown face that tugs at my own self-doubt.
That night, after the coffee shop as well bid me good night, I dropped the ceramic dish into the bussing cart, and listened intently to the clamor of the cheap metal spoon against the white ceramic. But at two am, there was not much other noise. No rumble of buses, and in the city, no real wild life. The sound of the drunk and meandering students leaving the bars was merely a gurgle like that of a pleasant brook. And I began the walk back to my door room.
It’s a pattern that has repeated many times. Sander… Mat… Keith… Dave. And each time, I numb just a little more. Tonight, there is not even tears, only a sigh from resignation. Take what you can, as time sallows, it chides, and then in a breathy voice, "He too, will pass, and then too, there will be jasmine tea."