Cosmic Bump

  

They should bump into each other, literally, was what the cosmos decreed, and at times like these he found such a fact consoling. It wasn’t even a party or some such other standard platform for the mingling of bodies, it was at some horrific fry it fast and call it food chain, where because the usual signs marking the facilities were on vacation, they actually met physically before consciously, he going into, she coming out of, a bathroom.

Afterward he would have liked to say it was love at first sight, but that wasn’t exactly true. There was an instant spark though, in fact since every inclination he’d had to find a urinal completely left him in order to make room for the sheer size of the spark, it was hard to miss. She liked to say she scared the pee out of him, but it wasn’t fear – it was recognition, though recognition of what he couldn’t say at the time.

But he never saw the inside of that men’s room, he even was just taking her word that it was the men’s room. Neither one of them ever went back to that location, they had both been traveling, driving in opposite directions, when they stopped there; he had stopped because he was hungry and the poor choice of eatery he freely admitted from the beginning. She had stopped there only because she needed to use the bathroom, needed so badly that she merely picked when faced with the unmarked doors, and just kept on moving upon discovering she picked different than tradition. She liked travelling, practically did so for a living, but when the downsides inevitably appeared she just rolled with them.

He, fortunately, never ate at that franchise either: they talked awhile in the hall then moved to the lobby when someone else also needed an unmarked door, and then she decided on twilight and cool evening over garish neon and sweaty associates. She had never intended on eating there and wouldn’t dare once seeing inside, but she did at least suggest he get something before they continued talking outside. He was still hungry but since he’d been hungry since birth he’d gotten used to it; in the moment he followed her outside even he had to wonder why he really decided on a pit stop just then.

After talking for hours, they ultimately ended up having sex in her car because it was a large rental with tinted windows; he was driving his own ten year old car whose spacial proportions he’d never thought twice about, mainly because he disliked travelling. He frankly disliked anything with ‘too much risk’, which made it especially surprising, even to him, when he went down on a woman he’d just met – it wasn’t just ‘not his thing really’, it was entirely unlike him. Even now his inside spaces would momentarily seize and quail at the thought of the leap he’d taken. To others he might smile and simply chalk it up to the heat of the moment, but he knew, she knew, it was an understatement. Things did work out for them, not because of them and their choices, but in spite of them: the cosmos had worked awfully hard to make sure they fell in love inside that car.

So now on evenings such as this, when she’s late and not answering her phone, when the dinner he’d made was past salvageable, he thinks how it seemed the cosmos somehow cared, and with the thought of that cosmic bump he consoles himself, until he hears a car in the driveway.