#sneaky prufrock

Coffee Spoons and Missed Opportunities

“I have measured out my life in coffee spoons”

She wasn’t sure where she had heard it, but it had stuck with her, some tick that had wormed under her skin and hadn’t stopped itching since it had arrived. She couldn’t dislodge it; that would be too messy. Instead she had to approach it, find the hot needle to make it slip away. 

It wasn’t so much the coffee spoons as the truth of it all that she couldn’t stand, why it was still there after all this time. Coffee spoons weren’t her measure. Her life wasn’t one filled with doldrum and mundanity, where routine was barely interspersed by indecision. Instead her life could be measured in missed opportunity, all those moments that could have gone the other way, and how fucking much she dwelt on them.

Ollie, the second row from the nearby boy’s school rugby team slipping his hand against her neck and lingering there for a moment, as if asking the question, whether she was ok with that, whether it was something she wanted. Her eyes had flared, and he’d moved on, cowed by her sudden reaction. There was shock in them, for sure, but it wasn’t alarm or fear that filled the stare she fixed him with. It was the sudden realisation that she wanted that, very much. But his hand was gone, and she didn’t have the courage to tell him.

Fumblings at a festival with a boy she barely knew, a friend of a friend of a drug dealer, half hopped up on pills and booze and rolling around in tent pegs and sleeping bags. He’d found the ties that kept the whole sorry state from collapsing in around them and made a joke about tying her up. She’d given a half-hearted laugh and said nothing either way, and he’d continued with the fumbling and the groping. 

The tie of a businessman she’d somehow ended up staring at in a sleazy hotel room. Flirting in a bar led to stumbling in a street led to… this, a bad decision that would lead to a worse mistake when the morning rolled around, but for now she was staring at the tie like it was the answer to every question she’d ever answered. She brought it up to her eyes, wanting to block out every last thing in this sorry world, just lose herself to it for a moment. Then he walked in, asked her what she was doing, and she’d laughed it off as a drunken fascination. 

Dozens of them, lined up, every one a measure, each one leaving behind it a footprint she never wanted to see again. She was the culmination of everything that had never happened, a thousand near misses when all she wanted was a hit. To be hit. Used. Tied. Blindfolded. Choked. To slip into that time where everything hadn’t been interrupted and avoided, where each encounter had ended up giving her all that she wanted. 

Twenty two years and all she could do was regret. It’s all you can do, at twenty two. You haven’t had enough time to do anything else. Coffee spoons and missed opportunities, and more good times than you can care to notice.