It was the Sunday before Thanksgiving, the morning after I had ended things with Lyell. I felt a palpable weight lifted off me. That morning, everything felt bright and pure and new.

I walked into a coffee shop on the corner of Bowery and Bleecker Street and noticed a familiar face on the other side of the front entrance. He had dark sunglasses, a chiseled face, skin the color of Nutella spread, and a thin frame with long legs. His sneakers were as white as could be, as if they had just come out of the box for the first time. The man with a familiar face was eating slices of grapefruit. 

I ordered my Spanish latte and avocado toast, got on my knees for a bit to say hello to a little English bulldog, and joked around with its owner, asking him the dog’s pronoun. Then, I took a seat across the room from the man with the familiar face. 

The man, I realized, was Chris Rock. He had a small black journal and would occasionally scribble something inside of it. I liked that he never picked up his cell phone. He would sometimes glance my way. Like maybe he knew I had my eyes on him, too, even though I also had sunglasses on. 

When my avocado toast arrived, I dug into it with a plastic fork and knife. The fork snapped in half. Chris Rock looked my way. I said to the man sitting next to me that I had no idea I had this much strength. As I went to get another fork, I felt Chris Rock’s eyes on me as I walked past him. 

After going back to my table, I would steal glances at him, and he would steal glances back. We worked pretty hard to pretend we were not playing this little game. He occasionally scribbling in his little black book and me pretending to savor the avocado toast with black and white sesame seeds meshed on top. 

Chris Rock stood up and took off his sunglasses. He looked directly at me and began meticulously wiping the lenses with a cloth. He would not take his eyes off me.

I started to picture him running his fingers over me in little circles or tiny triangles or, frankly, in any shapes or directions that he desired. It was impossible not to imagine this, the way his eyes were burning into me as his fingers moved over the lenses of his sunglasses in perfect little motions.

Then he stopped what he was doing, put his sunglasses back on, and walked out onto the Bowery, heading north until I could no longer see him.

I wanted to follow him and tell him he was a comedic genius and how much I liked his sunglasses, and the way his eyes felt on me when he’d taken them off. 

But I did none of these things.

Instead, I took one last bite of my avocado toast savoring the flavor of the moist fruit, the olive oil slippery in my mouth, the black and white seeds coming together in perfect harmony.

***

Marie Sabatino has been sharing her stories at venues all over NYC, including Lit Crawl Manhattan, the National Arts Club, Galapagos Art Space, KGB Bar, and the Brooklyn Book Festival. She was recently awarded a Community Engagement Seed Grant from Hunter College to run storytelling workshops for underserved youth.