Kelvin - Part 2 - pipTalk Forums

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fractal007
Senior Member

since 2000-06-01

Posts 1958

0 posted 2009-05-22 10:37 PM

I sit here unobtrusively in a local coffee shop.  Kelvin is seated nearby.  He's just ordered a chocolaty drink and a woman has just noted how good the drink looks and how it must contain a million calories.  Of course the woman, along with the company among whom she is seated, could do with losing a few thousand calories of stored up fat herself.  But I will refrain from commenting further on that matter.

Another woman seated at the same table is talking about the school in which she works as a teacher.  She's just told her friends that, when someone is agitated about something she can see their aura quite distinctly.  I wonder what my aura must be like for her now.  There are a few random conversationalists seated between the women at the table and myself and so I suspect that my aura is eclipsed at best.  Surely, however, she can perceive Kelvin's aura, blindingly muddied as it is, to a far greater degree of accuracy than I can.

As for me, sufficiently protected and shielded by a nearby geriatric and his relatives as they flip through their lifestyle magazines while sipping lattes, I think I'll tell you a bit more about Kelvin and the day he's just had.  I'd ask Kelvin myself but he is a shy young man and I bet he'd get really mad at me if he found out I was watching him.  He'd probably respond the way the attractive young lady sitting mysteriously there on the couches in the corner would.

"Who the hell are you?"

"Well, I'm Kevin," I'd say, taken aback by the sudden rebuff.  Definitely not in accord with the practices I suspect are contained within the book on male spirituality that I just purchased at the bookstore next to this coffee shop.

Kelvin was tired today.  When he came into the office it was after night that had begun with his first attempt at meditation after years of neglecting the subject.  He decided that he could use the skill.  After all,what better way was there to calm the nerves and to still the hungry beast within.

People were starting to comment now.  The cleaning lady was noticing the kindness expressed as a natural extension of his desire to rid himself of so many candy wrappers in the garbage can next to his desk.  Don, the project manager a few desks over, clucked his lips and tongue a few times on seeing Kelvin walking by with yet another package of "food" from the vending machine.

And Ryan, the software architect who's taken to helping Kelvin was no doubt noticing the way Kelvin flaked out today.  Kelvin even whined a bit at the prospect of switching to yet another architectural paradigm, and his plodding pace in solving a simple problem today was...unacceptable.

I'm finding it difficult to concentrate again.  Right now a little girl in the arms of the woman who made the original observation about Kelvin's drink is staring into my eyes.  As to the woman, eyes closed in some kind of teleological rapture, she remains oblivious to the moment of apparent mutual understanding passing between the little girl and myself.  Does she know what I'm doing?  Does she know how scandalous it is that I, a mere mortal and an imperfect one at that, am prying so deeply into the details of Kelvin's life and laying them bare for the entirety of the Internet to see?  The child's eyes are deep and all-consuming as children's eyes usually are.  To her my face is as new as an alien star seen up close for the first time.

While driving to this shop to fall into my typing fingers, Kelvin mused about his father.  The man was hard-working and never shied away from criticizing when he felt it was needed.

"You've never had anything good to say about me," Kelvin yelled to himself, imagining how a revealing encounter with his father might proceed.  Like his father, Kelvin had difficulty hurting anyone he didn't know.  If one knew Kelvin one was at greater risk than if one was a stranger on the street.  "So," Kelvin said, "I've had to hide from you, giving you only the construct you want to see."  I laughed when I heard that echo through the windshield.

When he got here, Kelvin sat down with the tall chocolate frappuccino, and cracked open a book to read.  Kelvin was having a hard time staying around work now that Salam was there at such weird hours.  The man, his piercing eyes and eternal smile irradiating Kelvin like light that could pierce the thick shadow around the darkest and most demonic secrets, appeared at very inopportune times.  On more than one occasion he'd smiled at Kelvin as he'd been on his way to pick up more hot chocolate or to get something from the vending machine.  At times Kelvin would muse impotently about Salam.

And Salam?  He was a decent fellow.  Having just graduated fresh out of Milton Frasier University, Salam was brimming with knowledge.  To him the world was new, work an alien place, this being his first landfall.  Salam was truthful in demeanor.  When, when, when? his soul would demand.  Soon, soon, soon, the muse would whisper back. Soon.

Mariposa, advanced in years, occasionally eyed the young Kelvin.  In her were conflicting emotions about the boy but somehow she had mastered the art of keeping them all in check.  If you could have seen her it would have been awesome.  But of course you can't.  Mariposa practices her art with deft secrecy, standing erect out of the darkness of anonymity only when you care to notice and she is not one to draw attention.  Yet a mere flutter of her eye lashes or a single word from her mouth can stir up hurricanes on shores you've never seen and of which the deepest reaches of my mind have understood only dimly.

And Kelvin, fish in water despite hating the conformity of his surroundings, remains oblivious to the drama unfolding around him.  Unable to set down the comforts of this or that satiation, Kelvin wanders on, ignorant in a desert of his own creation after an apocalypse only he could experience and which he alone affected.

Life's short. Think hard!
Me!