Published 'Purple Patch' 1996

I stare into space. 

People around me are shuffling papers, shuffling feet, blowing noses, some even communicating by word of mouth.

There is someone sitting a number of desks away with whom I've fallen in love.  Why people should fall in love, I never could understand.  One should rise with love, dawn with passion, expand and balloon with love, soar with deep deep love.  Not fall from grace, as the common expression implied.

I ought to plug on with my own job, not stare at other people busily doing theirs.  It won't get many numbers crunched, mooning over the young girl at the other end of the open plan office.  Young enough to be my daughter, by the look of her. 

She hardly ever returns the stare.  For all she cares, I probably don't exist at all.  I look down into my lap, to see if I can see the seat of the chair showing through it.  Surely, I do exist.  My body is literally screaming to exist.  And such a body simply needs someone like that flower of flesh and innocence to complete it.  I'd be in the frame.  In the reckoning.  I'd be the person, rather than just the thing on legs.

The time has come to take some positive action.  Walk over and merely say, "Would you like to go out with me?"

I'm back at my desk. 

It all turned out rather successfully ... in a way.  Silly billy that I am, I got all my words arse about face, and I think what I must have said was, "Would you like to come in with me?"  But she seemed to know what I meant ... despite her innocent eyes.

She gave me an old-fashioned look fit to set a corpse reeling back on the balls of its feet. 

Such humiliation was far preferable to any carnal interaction for which I'd previously yearned.  I can now sit at my VDU screen, like a wallflower in the sunrise. 

I wonder if my other colleagues notice my beaming self-satisfaction and blushing pride.