Remembrance of things past

Whoa, I just had the most jarring experience. After my yoga class, I am always hungry, because I go on an empty stomach as suggested by the studio and it's lunchtime when it's over. Today my kitchen offered rice and beans or oatmeal, so I opted for Tryst instead. Took a corner seat at the front table, the one covered in flash cards and textbooks on weekdays. To my left was a couple, across the corner was an attractive man completely absorbed in his newspaper. Did my thing - read book, ate salad, drank water. Exchanged a few words with the couple and the people across the table from me, but not the guy on the end. After forty-five minutes or so, he asked me to watch his seat, I said sure. Then I thought, hmm, he's so familiar, do I know him? When he returned we laughed over how I had protected his spot against a newcomer and his paper against the guy bussing tables. Then he seemed really familiar.

And I realized I had hooked up with him last summer. Didn't remember until that point because the night of the hook-up I was only wearing one contact lens. (Long story, suffice it to say my vanity got the better of me). But his voice, I remembered his voice. Calm, self-assured, that kind of voice that you can hear even if spoken low in a crowded room. And what recollection I could piece together of his features seemed to match this person in Tryst, totally confounding my sense of what's done and gone versus here and now. And he was kind of giving me funny looks, which I intrepeted as annoyance because I was chatting with the other people at the table. Or had intruded on the corner he had previously had all to himself. Funny looks or no, he didn't address me by name, and by the time I'd realized who he was I thought it would be odd to say, hey, are you ___? But now I'm wishing I had. I kinda liked him. Damn. Damn damn damn.

What we call reality is a certain relationship between sensations and memories which surround us at the same time...From this point of view regarding the true way of art, was not nature herself a beginning of art, she who had often allowed me to know the beauty of something only a long time afterwards and only through something else--midday at Combray through the remembered sound of its bells and the tastes of its flowers.
-Marcel Proust, The Walk by Swann's Place