Little Gifts Given Unasked.

I sat in the sun, all coffee and paper and venom at the passing world. She sat, uninvited. I didn't look up or acknowledge her. She might have thought I was someone else and after a moment she was sure to notice that I wasn't that person and leave me to the gravel and life's mass of forgotten moments.

"What happened to you?" She asked me. Her voice said that she had not mistaken me for someone else, though she couldn't know me. No one here knew me and that's why I came all this way.

I looked up at her, not pretty, not ugly, the kind of person of persons that one could dismiss as casually as a cough while laughing. "What happened to you?" She asked, again.

"I've been broken." I told her. Broken by fate and by hate and hitting pavement and by too many movie promises, I omitted.

"You'll heal." I chuckled and she ignored me. "You'll be just fine."

I made a show of making friends with the newspaper as if to say I was only interested in one friend at a time. When I glanced up she had evaporated. "You'll be just fine." She had said.

Y'know, I probably will be.