The Glance.

Dark liquid filled the cup, pitch black and scorched coffee, the water had broken, not cemented itself with the grounded bean.  A laid cigarette rested between my finger tips.  I watched a woman pass on this cobble stone street.  Well dressed.  The kind of well dressed that meant she wouldn’t notice a man like me; scruffy, dead-beat, vagrant, potent of tar and caffeine, whiffs of alcohol implanted from the nights scurry.  She caught my eye but quickly scarpered.  She knew we wouldn’t meet in any of our recent lives.  Her temptation rested beneath her iris.  Wonderment, a fascination whether there would ever be a what-if or ever was.   A lifted my hand, gestured hello.  Any onlooker would not think twice about it, as though she was looking at the vermin of the streets.  I knew differently.  A glance can tear down buildings if lingered too long.  She lingered long enough.
I let her walk away.  ­­­­­She would never be back, and I would never think of her again.  She might think of me tonight, briefly, while she rested in bed with her husband.   She would gaze over his shoulder, and for a minute, eclipsed by lust and a face forged by an over eager glare my face would flash in the essence of her eyes.   And just as quickly as I would appear, I would disintegrate.  Forever lost in the back of her mind like so many over temptations she wishes she would indulge upon if she only let herself. 
Ash scattered onto the table, a pen had leaked onto the table cloth, much like the Rorschach ink blots it left me with a picture what could be interpreted a thousand different ways.  I felt, that as tribute to my admirer, I would name the ink stain ‘the stare’, and I would wait for the ink to form a face, then to form eyes to stare back at me, no different than the fleeting woman, then I’d watch as the lips formed in my imagination, conjured from fiction, from other women, as I’d not the chance to absorb every ounce of beauty.    
Fingering the cloth, forming the face with the tips of my hands, I wished her back if not to play with the day-dream.  To fabricate fact from a dream, for her to come back, to tell the stranger that today, he doesn’t need to day dream.  Today the dream’s a reality.
The street begins to pedestrianise, the woman is no longer recognisable.  I look over and notice that she had likely picked up her pace as I raised my hand, I should know a man of a life lived will never be suited for a life so rich.  I left a paper note, it took care of the bill and the waitress,   covering the ink stain with a napkin I pulled in my chair, left my unfinished cigarette to burn and began to walk into the crowd.  I was at the moment no richer or poorer than any over face from afar.  Once more a ghost to capture an eye of a woman so real.