To unfair suprises

I’m always surprised when I find the salt jar on the kitchen rack empty. This doesn't happen often, but I never notice the bottom coming. I reach for it blindly. And when I swirl the spoon with scooping purpose in the airy emptiness of the jar, I feel let down. “Already?” I wonder like a fool. Yes, it can be replaced, but why must I, I ask unreasonably.

Cheap drinks and unhinged days, heavy silences and endless rants, shared for years with people whose T-shirts I recognize on a clothesline, the shape of whose faces and secret fantasies I know intuitively, whose military unwillingness to lend books I have broken through. I reached for these people blindly.

Days and moments fly by before I see the unfamiliarity. New faces, new quirks, tiring first impressions. A mechanical revision of personal stories in a bid for fresh intimacies. Sprinkled in between the large swathes of the old, well-worn camaraderie, bits of new was welcomed.

But now, in a sharp zoom out, I see myself standing, my knees a little wobbly, eyes wide in unreadiness, in a scene I did not see being set up. It is not ugly, no. It is in fact more alive than the easy inaction of familiarity. But I’m spooked by the precious little say I had in the onset of the strangers.