Human Nature 

And A Park Bench

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He and his companion sat side by side on a park bench smack in the middle of the terrible summer seat, both sipping different flavors of bubble tea and sweating all their worries away beneath the glare of the harsh midday sun.

The straining sound that his companion’s straw made as the drink was steadily being drunk away sounded like bad plumbing. He relinquished the straw seconds later to chew on tapioca pearls. He himself sipped in silence, relishing the honeydew flavor. In this little sequence of events, one could easily distinguish the basic differences in their personalities, but only the very simple. One was loud, one was quiet.

But if one were to expand on such things, say, ask why the smaller one was so loud. Had he grown up with a house of rowdy boys? Had his father been a sports’ fan who became rather passionate about an ongoing game? Perhaps his mother had been one of the women who often spoke loudly and without tact.

There could be many assumptions humans could make of other humans but these two were not the main focus at this point in time. Technically speaking, they were proxies to the following events but they are expressing things that they had seen, not experienced.

A woman and her son, both average looking, no one you’d look twice at, were walking side by side, the mother looking less than happy but not entirely angry. The song partook to climbing a regular sized tree every time they came to this certain park and when he was out of sight, the woman would rest her hands on her knees for exactly fifteen seconds before getting up and looking extremely conflicted, like she had forgotten some crucial piece of information, before her face was wiped of any such emotion, leaving it as clean and as vague as it was when she arrived.

“Maybe it’s a coping mechanism.” The smaller said. His voice was distorted by the sticky tapioca on his teeth. “A weird one at that but she looks really tired. Maybe she didn’t want the husband. Or even the kid for that matter.”

The taller one tapped the tip of the straw against his chin, feeling the condensation wet his skin. “The kid doesn’t seem to be bothering her.”

“Really?” the smaller said, knitting his brows. “Well if you say it then I guess it must be true.”

They stayed quiet for a second longer, watching the woman trail behind her son as he ran to the swings. “Maybe she has bad back problems.” The smaller offered up another theory. “Or, she has some kind of cancer that gives her headache. What about a brain tumor?”

“Don’t you think she’d be in a hospital by now if it was that serious?”

The smaller pursed his lips and nodded, accepting the absurdity of his claims. That day they finished of their bubble tea and parted ways, agreeing to meet again tomorrow.

The next day was the same. They were both sat at the same bench, watching the youngster and his mother trek the park. This time the smaller had gotten a green tea flavor. The taller had gotten the same thing.

The son’s legs disappearing in the leaves of the tree as the mother bent down as if she were about to vomit. The smaller mouthed the countdown and, as expected, on one she got up with a worried look and it faded away like the clouds parting after a storm.

“Perhaps... morning sickness?” the smaller said, making the noisy draining sound with his straw again.

“Implausible,” the taller said simply. “She seems far past the mental state of wanting other kids.”

The smaller hummed and drank his tea.

“That hairstyle looks uncomfortable.” He mumbled with the straw between his teeth.

The tight bun that gave no hope for the hair to breathe pulled, almost uncomfortable looking, all the way to back of her head in a small mound of hair.  Her forehead, prevalent with no hairs to cover it, glistened with sweat in the summer heat.

The taller shrugged uncommitted to his companion’s opinion on her choice of hairstyle. “Though, wouldn’t that mean she would be like a neat freak or something?” mumbled the smaller around his straw, “Maybe some kind of OCD?”

The taller blinked, surprised that he actually agreed with this notion, hummed and gave a mumble of approval.  

“Look at the way she fans her fingers all nervous-like.” The smaller whispered as if he were afraid of someone overhearing their conversation.

The woman was furling and unfurling her fingers subtly but still noticeable to any person who would care to give a second glance. “Nervous.”

The taller gave a hum in reply.

The sudden broken pipe sound aded the air again, denoting the nearing end of this particular visit. The taller checked his watch and took note that in a few minutes, all of this would be behind him and he’d of completed another summer day lazing around a park with a friend watching a woman and trying to understand her life story.

The last gulp of his green tea was made in silence, as they exchanged knowing glances and hopped off the benches, bidding each other a farewell before turning in the opposite directions.

The following day was stranger.

They sat, bubble tea in hand, in the smoldering heat wearing cut-offs and old t-shirts. The smaller one had actually followed up on yesterday’s beverage with a green tea while the other decided on a passion fruit blend.

The woman had arrived, on the dot. She had noticeably-well, only to the people that were paying attention-looser hair, giving off an air of strange comfortableness; peace of mind, if you will. Her son climbed up the tree but instead of bending down, she was greeting by a man of similar age.

He was tanned, like a fishermen, tall and built but age had taken its toll on his thinning hair. He seemed kempt, formal; a military type but with kind eyes and gold wire-rimmed spectacles. Her face fell in confusion and confliction, a prolonged look this time as opposed to the fleeting traces of it on her face when she stood back up. He talked to her, seemingly ignoring the obvious look of perplexity. Her breathing was shaky, as her chest heaved up and down nervously.

The man talking to her bowed his head politely and walked off.

The woman had stood there, shocked for a few minutes, before hissing to her son, motioning him to come down at once. He did and she grabbed his wrist, pulling away, assumingly back home.

The two companions said nothing of this incident, only exchanged uncertain glances. The uneasiness lingered thick in the air, like a layer of glaze, as they meagerly sipped their drinks.

The finished their tea and parted ways.

They never saw the woman, her son, or even that man again. With a neighborhood as tight-knit and as small as theirs, it added an eerie factor to that incident in summer.

The two companions never really thought of visiting the park after that. The casually met up some days, ate light lunches and took walks along the shore of the little seaside town before school resumed and they left their hometown, parting ways.

That incident in summer seemed miles away and the two gradually forgot it ever happened.

It was a good five years later they met in the city and agreed to have lunch together, recommencing things as if no barrier was created in the duration of their separation; they were of that kind. They talked as casually as they would have five years ago, not really seeing anything wrong with a five year gap away from each other.

“Do you remember that woman?” asked the smaller, sipping on a glass of white wine.

The taller took a little time to think about the words and it suddenly clicked. He nodded meekly, spearing and heirloom tomato with his fork.

The smaller adjusted his cuff links, all scruffy and distorted from their original color because of all the scraping of the edges against a dusty chalkboard. “My mom told me she committed suicide about five years ago.”

The taller didn’t expect to feel a creeping in his stomach but it happened and he didn’t know why. “Oh?” he said, halfheartedly chewing a piece of boiled chicken .

The smaller hummed and nodded his head, picking apart his steak haphazardly and nearly knocking down his wine glass. The taller moved it away thoughtlessly.

“I wonder what happened.” He said with steak heavy in his mouth.

 The taller shrugged and a few minutes of stale silence passed before the conversation was resurrected by the smaller talking about how a student of his co-worker had been caught smoking weed in the girl’s locker room.

The talk of the woman seemed to fade away in the casual chatter of the formal restaurant. In the back of their minds they really were wondering what became of the woman with the uncomfortable hairstyle, who retreated to some other world for fifteen seconds a day at the park. They wondered what became of the man or her son. They wondered why she had felt that life was not worth living anymore, even more so around the time that they were conducting this little human observation experiment of theirs.

Human beings are fragile things, shaped up and molded and brought down again by the many perils and joys of life itself. It takes a million things to make someone happy and a single situation to make someone want to die; why it happens, you shouldn’t ask because humans are difficult creatures.

With time perhaps they can figure it out themselves because no single person could be up the task; devoting years to find out why others feel the way they do. It was exhausting, and that is perhaps why the two companions were compelled not to pursue the matter of the woman, her son and the man with the gold-rimmed glasses any further and instead took solace in the fact that they were alive, content and comfortable in the kindest meaning as they munched on heirloom tomatoes and took little sips of wine.