Sitting at a table in the coffee shop he called her peripatetic. That "ick" ending made it sound like a medical condition, like maybe something was wrong with her. She wasn't really a gypsy; she just moved around too much and long enough to learn the shortest distance between two points is usually the wrong way down a one-way street.  Still, if she had a crystal ball she might see where this was going.

Take any situation and hold it to your ear.  Like shells at the beach what you'll hear isn't the ocean, or what you think the situation holds.  You'll hear the rush of your own blood: circling,  searching, echoed indistinctly in a language that speaks only to you,  in which you aren't fluent. 

So far it seemed like one long stutter--trying, trying to tell it, whatever it was: the night with fireflies like stars flickering what she imagined to be Morse for "This is everything you'll ever feel";  how fear is like an amputee sitting on the edge of the bed waiting for the other shoe to drop; how she longs for the moment past which there is no forgetting. 

Stutter, stutter, stutter.

Her father told a story about a teacher he had, a man who stuttered but who had a magic word: when he came to a wall he said his word and open sesame  he could go on.  Her father didn't remember the word, only that it was something simple. She thought maybe  might be the word that would  carry her through, or if.  She thought maybe if  she knew a magic word it might translate everything, be like a philosopher's stone or maybe just one of those foreign language dictionaries: Her to Him/Him to Her.

She thought how difficult it was for people to say what they mean, to even know what they mean.  She never understood attempts to contact the dead.  It was trouble enough fine-tuning the channel of his spirit, only a corner of a table away.  She couldn't imagine seeking out further crossed wires with someone who couldn't manage to say what they wanted when they were still alive. How many lives must we stutter through, anyway? 

Maybe it was easier in a world of grunts and sighs. Maybe it wasn't a matter of words or sounds at all. What they needed was a shared language--a look, a smile, you'll know, you'll just know what they mean. Maybe they needed to come to their other senses: smell, taste, see, touch. 

What about smell?  It might work.  A scratch-and-sniff epiphany wasn't something to look down one's nose at.  Certain scents clung intimately to memories of certain people or events.  She wondered if they had a word for that, olfactory deja vu: not seeing again, but smelling again.  Powder, and she was five or six, younger or older, watching her mother prepare her face for the day.  The scent of her mother drifted disconcertingly through the house for a long time after she left it.  One day, months and months later, she put on a T-shirt from her mother's drawer.  Her mother's scent lingered and she was stunned by how close she felt to skin on shoulders that had shrugged off life.  And the smell inside her sister's car juxtaposed with the salty ocean air coming through the open window on the drive to the doctor's office.  Those were scents she'd never smell again.

But not every smell is connected to a memory, some exist only in a moment, and the next one.  Peonies in spring, for instance.

She wasn't sure about the scent of him, so far he smelled clean and also a little musky.  She thought sweat smelled good.  And she thought it tasted good, too--salty and more.  Ah, another sense: if the tongue couldn't speak,  it could lick a wet nape, or the hollow between clavicle and neck.  Taste and touch, together again, in concert.

And sight?  She wasn't sure he saw her. His eyes kept following the waitress. But she saw him.  Already his hands told her a lot: she watched them move through the air and against things as though some undetermined desire to grasp, and then let go, propelled them.  They tapped and drummed a strong percussive counterbeat to the melody of staying in place.  Was he nervous?  Was she?  Let me read your palm, she thought.  Where's that crystal ball?

What she knew she'd gotten from another sense, which may, after all, only be the other five or six somehow combined with a seventh, more final sense: the more perfect knowledge of not knowing, and this: the adjunct stutter of language.  But so far she hadn't really said a thing.

***

Sometimes it was hard getting her to talk.  Usually when she was worried. Or sad. She'd just drift off.  Like that time in the coffee-shop. The one with the great French dips and the smokin' hot waitress. When she first got back.  They met there to talk.  But then she didn't.  Which was weird, because he remembered from before she was pretty chatty.

  She looked good that day.  She was wearing a tight, pale blue sweater - it looked soft.  And she had that shiny lip stuff on her mouth. They hadn't even done it, yet. They'd been on a few dates, but then she took off for... where was it?  Some town on the Oregon coast that rolled the sidewalk up at sundown.  She went there to take care of her sick sister.  He hadn't called her much during those weeks, he figured she was busy.  And sick people?  Dying?  It was a downer.  He didn't want to hear about it.  And then she'd taken off for Morocco.  He'd gotten postcards, impersonal travelogs.  She sure liked details.  She was very descriptive about everything, down to the design on the glass her tea came in. Kind of boring, really.  She had to write super small to get all the details on the postcards.  It hurt his eyes, so he didn't always finish reading them.  On the way to the coffee shop  he'd worried there might be a quiz.  But she was all quiet.  She looked at him, but her eyes seemed kind of sad and far-away.

He didn't ask her what she was thinking, didn't know what that might bring up, he was tired from the long week at work.  He was afraid she was thinking about her sister and she'd want to talk about her, about the funeral, maybe.  He'd been hoping she'd come back.  He'd thought about her while she was away. He liked her smile and how she laughed at stuff he said, stuff no one else laughed at.  So he said something about having missed her, about her moving around and traveling and then waited for her to launch into a big story about some escapade she'd had in Morocco.  But she didn't.  She just fidgeted with the cutlery and looked distracted.  He'd wondered why the hell she met him there if she wasn't going to say anything?  So he asked her: 'Wanna go to my place?"  She said yes.