At the Coffee Shop

Their hands on the small round glass table
Two stiff-backed snakes on frosted grass –
Yearning to relearn the cursive of slack and slither.
How they measure the nothing of sighs, the everything of shadows
Petrified by pocket-sized silences.

One hand is ringed with gold,
skin softened by lotions and keys to a house
that locks safely every night.
The other is inked with old cuts,
nails short from work that stains the day
and refuses to wash off.

Steam rises between them,
coffee breathing like a third witness.

“Look,” one laughs,
turning her wrist so the bracelet catches light,
speaking of vacations, promotions,
a life narrated in milestones.
Her voice is bright, practiced,
the way you learn to speak
when people expect success from you.

The other listens, smiling,
flexing fingers stiff from mornings
that begin before dawn.
She boasts too – of freedom, of stories,
of how no one tells her what to do.
Her words arrive lighter than her days.

They remember hands like these
once sticky with mango juice,
gripping bicycle handles,
promising silently never to become strangers.

Now they compare lines –
fate, heart, work –
as if the palm knows how to confess.

The ringed hand envies the scars,
their proof of courage, of choosing risk.
The scarred hand envies the softness,
the permission to rest.

Neither says it.
They drink, they laugh,
they pull their hands back into their laps
where longing is easier to hide.

Outside, the world keeps moving.
Inside, two lives pause briefly,
touching only at the fingertips of what might have been.