Awkwardness is a Luxury

As I was leaving the cafe, I said over my shoulder to my barista friend, “Hey, good luck with the rest of the shift; I’m off to home.” She replied, “You… aahh.” She stopped. I stopped.

“I was going to say ‘You too’ but then I stopped realizing how dumb that sounded,” she said.

You know that feeling. You blurt out some automatic pleasantry only to realize as soon as you say it just how wrong, inappropriate or just plain dumb it sounds.

“No worries. That’s better than when I last said something like that.”

“What?”

“Oh, I was leaving and a friend said to me, ‘See you later. Good luck with the doctor for, you know, that THING.’ and I said ‘You too’.”

A look of horror on their face. Mutual confusion? Check. Internalized embarrassment? Check. Hurt feelings? Check. Sideways glancing like there was something over to the left that shouldn’t exist in this dimension of reality, but is evidently there, and not being noticed by anyone else but me, but I have to try to pretend it is there, just so we move off this moment? Check.

Okay, I wasn’t off to see a proctologist for my first age-40 ‘special’ exam, and wishing them the same. No, I wasn’t off to get a baseball-sized teeth-and-hair growth attached to my back removed, or hinting they should. I wasn’t imagining them off to a psycho-therapist.

But it felt like it.

And they knew it.

I knew it.

The frappuccino cup that served as neutra terra pacis between our two worlds knew it.

So, after the eons of three seconds, I turned robotically and walked away. They did the same.

And none spoke of it again. I have broken that unspoken solemn-but-forgotten pact.

Somewhere the anti-muse* is coming for me.

[*The Anti-Muse of Nervousness. Not to be confused the anti-moose that was sent to Thomas Jefferson to prove to post-Revolutionary French society folk that large animals can indeed come from North America.]