Moments of Transition
She waited for him in the usual place by the window where fat drops of spoiled rainwater sloshed against the glass and then downward into the crowded gutter. Her brown hands were folded neatly in her lap. Her legs were crossed. It was five fifteen in the city and the streets ran black, gray, blue and brown with people. Inside, her coffee sent smoky tendrils of wasted heat spiraling into the thirsty air.
	“Can I get to you anything else miss?” The waiter spoke in rough, broken English. Michelle smiled but shook her head. Her eyes never left the door. It had been this way for two weeks now. The same seat, the same lonely white cup of coffee, ever since he’d said those four words.
	“I’m moving to Seattle.” His bright hands were resting just beyond her fingertips. 
	“Why? What’s wrong with things here?”
	The way he smiled was like a smirk; lips pressed together and turned upwards on one side. She imagined he had dimples as a child, lost in an ocean of freckles and dirty brown hair. “It isn’t that there’s something wrong with here, it’s that, well, I just feel like I need to move on. I need to know how it feels to be somewhere I haven’t known my entire life.”
	The words stung. “So do you want me to go with you?”
	“I don’t know.” He looked down at his own cup of coffee. It was white and heavy. It reminded her more of a soup bowl than a cup. Her mother would have said “Nobody needs that much caffeine in their system. It makes you do strange things, y’know?”
	“I think you just said that you’re leaving me.” And she thrust her hands in her hair and started pulling the long black braids into a pony tail. She felt for a minute that if she stopped moving her hands they would start to shake. Then she would start to shake.
	“No, I don’t think I’m saying that; not at all. I’m just saying that I don’t know right now. I’m still planning.” He was staring at her. “I’m just letting you know what's on my mind.”
	“Am I?” She asked suddenly. He just stared.
	“Am I on your mind?” She started thinking about how long they had been together, these meetings, the way she'd given herself over to him. Sex swirled in her thoughts, slowly at first until her hands started to tremble. 
	“I’m thinking about a lot of things. You, me, and what I want to do with myself. I just don’t have any more answers that I can find here. That’s why it’s time to go. Maybe there's somewhere else for me where I can find myself.”
	There was a silence between them then. In that space the sounds of the world rushed in; Traffic, conversations from across the table, wisps of laughter; raindrops.
	“Tell me to go with you.” It was the only chance she could give him.
	“We should think about that first. We should think about what that means.” 
	“You think.” She stood up quickly and pulled her purse over her shoulder.
	“You’re just going to leave me like this?” His voice was strained with surprise.
	“Wouldn’t you?” She never turned back around.
It rains two hundred days a year in Seattle. She looked it up that night. Somehow that seemed like less than here, but it didn’t make here all that much different. Here the dirty rain fell deep into the night, turning the skyline a think purple color. Fifty thousand people pushed and shoved their way through crowded streets, in and out of malls, stores, and coffee shops. Here nobody bothered her when she sat alone at the booth near the window where they used to meet for coffee everyday after work. She with her same clear glass of espresso, a dwarf next to his towering mug.
She rolled her ebony fingers across the ceramic white rim of his cup. It was heavier than hers had been. Her tiny hands balanced it carefully; one on each side. Cautiously she lifted it to her lips and drank.