Blame [The Diary, Bouquet, Used Only Once]

Dear Diary:

It’s Washington Square Park, lunchtime, one of the final weeks before it gets so suddenly cold that if your phone rings while you’re on Broadway you’re not going to answer because you don’t have those touch screen gloves yet and it’s not worth taking your hands out of your pockets.

I’m having coffee on a bench with a friend who has these really exotic stories about photographing Brazilian protests and attending Colombian journalism seminars. But there’s a couple arguing on the bench right over his shoulder, so we stop talking about ourselves and reinvent their quiet showdown through our eyes

He cheated on her, we assume. Now he’s trying to win her back, which accounts for the enormous bouquet of flowers he’s holding. She’s not buying it, I think. My friend disagrees.

They stop staring at each other so intensely. Our attention span wanders and the conversation drifts back to school, projects, my fall in New York, his summer in South America.

And then the girl slams the bouquet of flowers — the boy’s possible peace offering — to the ground. Hard. Hard to the point where I feel bits of water on my face.

She storms off. The boy picks up the flowers. He pauses. He offers them to me.

I turn him (them?) down. Accepting those flowers would have been like having a dissatisfied customer send back a plate of undercooked spaghetti Bolognese and the waiter going up to a nearby table with the order asking, “Do you like pasta?”

So he shrugs and walks off towards the nearest exit with his battered bouquet and leaves us with the stains of water on the park pavement.

We never did find out what started their argument.