Two men at one table

A man in Amman takes the same window table at a café most Saturday mornings, with a notebook he opens and rarely writes much in.

The waiter knows his order. He knows the man is, in some vague way, working on something. Years pass in that seat. Somewhere behind the notebook is the person this man could have been, the one who finished the thing, learned the instrument, made the call he kept putting off.

And at the same table sits the person he is actually becoming, one Saturday at a time.

Those two are going to meet. Not dramatically, not on a particular birthday, but at some point he will look up from the cup and see both of them clearly, and know how far apart they ended up.

Whether that meeting is a happy one is not decided when it happens. It is decided on mornings like this. On whether the notebook gets two pages or none. On whether the call gets made before the tea goes cold. Each ordinary Saturday moves the two men a little closer together or a little further apart.

That is what makes it hard. There is no single day to get right. There is only this one, then the next, then the one after.

The man by the window is not failing. He is simply here again, and so is the other one, the man he could still be, waiting to see which of them stands up when the bill comes.