I am entranced. I am fixated. I cannot seem to pry my tired eyes away from her. I must be crazy, I must look like fool, but I just can not turn away. All my focus has all at once been redirected, and for that I am hopelessly unashamed.

I see her sitting on a high chair in the corner coffee house through black french doors with its peeling paint and run away rain drops. The windows are foggy, blurring out everything inside but a focused image of her sitting alone humming a quiet tune remains. I see her anxiously tap her feet and bite the cap of her pen while hovering over scattered papers and crumbs from a stale blueberry muffin. With every breath she takes I watch as her chest rises and then falls. I watch as she exhales and her bony shoulders hunch over and her body folds into her center.  Her face describes her delicate disarray. One that accurately matches that of the papers in front of her. The rain outside falls lightly to the soft humming that escapes her delicate lips.

I see that she looks tired. Small, yet noticeable bags of blue and grey shadow underneath her lower lashes. Her face looks diminished and defeated. Her posture is sloppy and unconformed and boneless. Long arms belonging to her melt onto the table and her perfectly arched back sinks into her chair. She puffs out her cheeks and blows all the air in her lungs into the crisp atmosphere that is the Barrington coffee house. She pushes her bangs off her lightly wrinkled forehead as her lonely eyes droop and the muscles in her face ease. My stare, continuous and unbroken, I pine over her every move, watching as she lets her pen slip through her sweaty fingers and hit the hardwood table. I see her pick up her steaming chai tea and wrap her chapped lips around the plastic rim of the cup. Taking a few cautious sips, she sets it back down and refocuses on the task in front of her. Frantically, she tucks her dark hair away once more. This time behind a pale ear decorated with plastic pearls. Just as I revert my stare from this stranger atop a throne inside a coffee house I’ve never been in, something catches my eye and pulls me right back. The pearls catch the light from the lamp hanging lazily from the ceiling. They sparkle even though they shouldn't, they're pearls--not diamonds. But somehow, oh somehow, those cheap pearls are compellingly glamorous and shining with poise. And back to her my eyes are pulled.

I am drawn to her. Drawn to her like a magnet, like a fly to a bright and promising lamp, like a parched desert wanderer to glistening water.

I watch as she lifts up her angelic head and opens her eyes slowly, peering out the window beside her. I am suddenly drowned by thousands of thoughts and reasoning as to why such perfection in a women like her, be viciously consumed by the depression that washes away her appearance. She rests her blushed cheek upon her white hand and glares at a woman across the street who is walking quickly, holding a meager grey umbrella over her head. I watch intrigued by her as she stares blankly, hopelessly even, out the dim window onto the murky wet streets of Seattle- opening and closing her bright eyes to the damp wonders outside the dusty coffee house. Perhaps I go in, order a coffee, and sit beside her? Confess my only recent affection to a girl whom I’ve never spoken to? Nonsense, I know better than that.

She watches as people scramble across the street and cover their barley dry heads with soggy wrinkled newspapers. They nearly race each other to the smallest square inch of dry sidewalk, shaded by a small blue awning that belongs to the bank across the street. I watch as an unprovoked subtle tear breaks away from her tender eye, and rolls its way down to the middle of her precious cheek, before being promptly swept away by the tips of her chipped-nail-polished fingers. A new feeling erupts in my chest, stinging and chaffing my insides. Her tears flow quietly and gently, sweetly in tune with the music of the rain. Each one of them formed slowly, and preciously in the immaculate corners of her enchantingly sad eyes.  My heart aches and stings with every unnoticeable tear that escapes her. My mind is numb to all things that do not pertain to her, my thoughts blur and I too, want to shed a tear.

I urge myself to move, to speak, to wave, to do something, to say something--anything, anything to help her. But I am too tightly ravelled in my dumbfounded, delirious, adoration.  

I watch as she turns back to her pile of open books and papers. Searching through them, looking for something in particular. When she doesn't find whatever it is right away, a look of panic sweeps away the tired inscribed in her face and I am greeted with a new side of her. At last I am able to move, but only move in closer, watching intently to her emerging dilemma. She soon gives up on her chase for the mystery missing item and I watch as she lets her head fall heavily into her clammy palms. Smoothing her messy hair away from her eyes, she sits up straight and grips her pen with the chewed cap again in her hands. Tapping it ferociously against the table and sending a small vibration through her small hands. She takes another sip from her large paper cup and rolls her head to crack her neck. She turns around and grabs the top of her chair and twists her back around, first the left, and then to right. Exhaling deeply, she collapses into her pale, folded, skeletal arms.  Sobbing quietly, unnoticeable to the other unworthy inhabitants of the corner coffee house, she hides her beautifully sad face in the comforting crevices of her elegant arms.

Tears flood the slippery skin on her arms and have no choice but to evacuate and roll down onto the papers underneath her. Her tears fall quickly, the rain outside trying to keep up with her pace. For a long moment she is still, nothing moves, no tears fall, she is just another girl inside another coffee house again. Just another human in this vast world. Another face I pass, another life I know not a thing about. For that perfect minute, she is equivalent to all the rest. Insignificant, unidentifiable, a fleeting image in the endless collage that has eluded to find its way into the pile of my unnecessary memories. Yet still, despite all rationality that echoes in my mind, my gaze does not break and my heart does not cease to fall for a perfectly handsome stranger.

She returns to having her back erect and adjusts her posture. Wiping her eyes and regaining control of her emotions she sighs a long sigh and takes another sip of her tea. Shaking the cup, confirming its emptiness, she then tosses it promptly into the waste basket filled with her crunched up notebook paper inside it. Just before she turns back to her work, she looks up from her uncomfortable place inside the old coffee house where all her papers and books lay, where her room temperature tea sits and leaves a small ring on the dark wood table, where the sound of the rain beats on the roof and creates a calming muffled sound that everyone inside enjoys along with over priced coffee and yesterday's leftover bagels. She looks up and her place inside the coffee house and her blue eyes sing in harmony with the shining pearls on her ears. She looks up and our eyes meet. She looks up, and looks at me.

She smiles with her straight, pallid teeth. The freckles on her nose and cheeks wrinkle as her lips turn up as she continues to look in my eyes and smile. My chest tightens and I am pleasurably consumed in my loss of my breath. The hair that was once tied behind her feminine ears, falls gently over her dimpled cheeks and squinting eyes. She quickly pulls it back and raises her hand to wave to me. Atop her throne, the goddess of my idolatry sits. Her pale unadulterated beauty, she greets with a gentle wave to the swine at her feet. All the worry in her eyes disappears and to my gypsy heart, an angel sings for me stay. Suddenly, a loud horn beeps at me. Quickly, my affection is ever so unjustly unravelled by a painstakingly brutal reality I have refused to acknowledge up until now.

"The light is green!" I hear someone shout angrily.

Her smile fades as I press my unsure foot on the gas pedal and hum off into the dark, miserable, rainy night with the image of her only left in the traces of my mind.