Reasons to not look away

She had this one smile that you couldn’t catch on camera, just as futile as ghost photography. It was a real one, which you could tell by the way her cheeks would squeeze up into her eyes while she was in the middle of saying something she really thought was good, like she’d take a little pause or maybe just between syllables drop it in there real quick. You really had to watch her face for it, and just now I got it and it was like enough for the whole day.

The first course came, tuna sashimi for her, California roll for me. She liked to hassle me about this, called it baby’s first sushi. She would try to sneak wasabi into my next bite when I wasn’t looking. She was always so playful here, like the chopsticks brought some hidden joy out. I fumbled with them, but come on you can’t retreat to the fork before the entrée.

Nobody ever came here except to sit at the part where they cooked the food in front of you, so we were in a booth in the abandoned corner and we could hear the music that was drowned out everywhere else by the sound of knives and spatulas hitting rhythms on stainless steel, which it was some pointless mix of bad jazz and that Japanese harp stuff. We laughed at this and everything else.

The days were hard. We didn’t sleep touching at night. The bill we couldn’t really afford was inherent in this moment. But that all didn’t matter.