The Game

When she talks, her light blue eyes are bouncing from left to right and back again. Nearly always repeatedly they keep doing that, occasionally she looks up to the plain gloomy white ceiling, it’s as if these eyes were dancing back and forth to the rhythm of her words and language. Randomly her stunning eyes are blinking while they overtly and unashamed celebrate their pirouettes. While talking, she is gently moving her hand up a little from the table just to outline and kind of explain what she is saying. Purely, naturally, she conducts and leads her words with an impressive eye-hand choreography, never has he ever seen anything so persuasive like that before.

They met something like six weeks earlier and happen to be from totally different parts of this planet. Different nations, different age, different in height, different professions and jobs – their worlds are arguably not congruent in so many things, it simply seems to be not compatible.

She pulls out a deck of cards, just as she has done almost every day for the last weeks. She has shown him this little awkward game on one of the first days they’ve met. He doesn’t even know what it’s called, but she finds, he is making some progress there. Yet today is something different. Her eyes are starting off, while talking, with this appealing dance again, but soon she focusses on him closely, and they forget to play cards – just in the midst of that game. She is realizing – this is it – this is the end of the summer – this is the last evening before she is flying back home – it is the last game, and they are not even thinking about finishing it. There is not going to be a winner, and there won’t be a looser either.

Never before did he ever look so closely in somebodies eyes. She is fixing him in her vision too. As if they were looking inside each other souls and spirits. Everything around them disappears, even the birds and crickets, the wind, the sweat on their faces from the humid air, the room itself somehow dissolves. She says: “You know what, this is like on pod – haven’t felt like that since my first college year”. No matter what one of them asks, there are no secrets, anything is answered and told. He is carefully touching one of her fingers she wears a ring on, gently twisting it back and forth only a little. She keeps talking as if nothing is happening there in this space in between. At one point she starts smiling and takes his other hand. He can only feel irresistible about this.

The night passes by and the morning sun is rising. They haven’t much changed their posture, still holding, touching and playing on each other’s hands. Then they choose silence, time has come. Both move their chairs back und stand up. They’re hugging an she says – “I already miss you. You give me a call, right?” “Sure, miss you too”, he answers.

It was an awesome summer. They are decided to stay in contact and meet again– no matter in what place, her world, his world or any other room on that planet. Simply for the reason because they owe each other finishing a game.