"Milk & Cinnamon"

He orders a cup of milk when he enters the café on the cold winter day.

“If you don’t play, then it won’t reach,” equivocated by someone close to him, Cinnamon. She was someone would work with him for years. Someone who he’d never think years ago could deal with his bull-headed opinions. Cinnamon, the song-writer who spent five years with him.

 They were opposites whenever she enfranchised something; he disenfranchised it in a flash. They could never agree on anything, maybe it was because of his stubbornness and the way he arrogantly thought of himself. There were times when she’d quietly but cheerfully write music for the young male and he’d fecklessly reject the music, throwing her precious work into the garbage.

“The songs don’t make any sense!” he’d shout angrily whenever he mentally played the song and at times she’d argue how he thought everything she wrote for him was stupid or pointless and go home muttering about it.

He’s not sure how they could work together for so long, but he continues to wait in the café. With a small smile he gives the waiter a few Euros. (The waiter doesn’t like being paid in foreign money, but accepts it anyways.)

“Milk, you’ll be milk,” she said facetiously to him. He stared at her, it was the first time he met a girl like her. The way she could innocently say that as she drew the last notes onto the music. It was the first time he liked a fiduciary.

“Why Milk?” he asked, chuckling at her innocent self.

“You don’t enervate people, you strengthen them even though you harass them and try to bring them down, but not completely, you make them stronger in that way,” she said with a smile. He ignored the fact she insulted him and takes a sip out of his milk. She wiped the milk mustache off his lip and added, “And because you always order the same cup of milk during the winter.”

He smiles at her softly, his fingers laced with hers and they awkwardly sat there as he held her hand. She smelled like cinnamon, cinnamon from baking Christmas cookies for the kids who entered the café. She was always the one to be full of Christmas spirit.

“Cinnamon, you’ll be Cinnamon.”

He remembered that delicate smile on her face as she heard the words. It was something he’d never want to forget.

“Will there be anything else, sir?” the waiter asks. Milk stares at the window longingly, watching the snow blanket the roads.

“A candy cane.”

He pulled on his jacket after one meeting and she sat there, too dumbfounded to say anything. His words stung her; he knew he was being a filibuster for delaying something important like his new album. She threw a candy cane at his head when he was leaving that day and for many other days she threw the candy cane at him for all the times he’d childishly ignore her feelings.

He stares at the cover of the album as the waiter leaves, the word equinox stares back at him in a twelve-sized font, written in cursive.

“I wish I every day was like an equinox,” she mused one day. Her wide eyes stared outside, the bright sky was turning dark and the stars were taking their spots in the heavens. She turned to the male who was fascinated by the cup of milk in his grasps and watching the chocolate cream fade away and make his milk brown. “Then maybe every day we could meet,” she said shyly. He looked up with another smile; he noticed that he smiled a lot when he was around her. “We should play in the snow one day,” she added. He nodded his head stiffly and drunk a bit of his milk.

“Perhaps.”

He stares outside again, his mind preoccupied by the snow, the little kids playing in the snow and throwing snowballs at the café’s windows. As the waiter comes back with his candy cane (and with a cinnamon bun and another cup of milk) he notices the untouched piano in the back of the warm little café that reminded him of his evanescent memories. The fatuous memories of a girl Cinnamon and a boy Milk.

For five years he could never realize what she meant whenever she said by ‘If you don’t play, then it won’t reach’ and as he finishes half of his cinnamon bun and half of his milk, he sits at the piano, his fingers press the familiar black and white keys and music, beautiful, velvet music comes from piano and fills the empty little café. And for some reason on this cold, winter night he has an epiphany. 

For Cinnamon.

“It’s amazing; truly amazing that now I know the greatest gift of all.”

It takes three days, twenty-three hours, eleven minutes and two seconds after her death for him to figure it out.

“Truly amazing,” he sings again.

Thank you, Cinnamon. 

Written for a class assignment, had to use words and underline and crap. Inspired by Nazotoki wa Dinner Ato de's case.  

Yeah, the last piece I wrote before my writer's block. Yep.