She rolls along to some internal music we can't hear. On sidewalks glass shards crunch and pop beneath her tires. Two vertebrae are broken but her flexible smile contracts, expands, a rubber band stretched tight. Up the ramp we follow this new person who has borrowed a familiar voice: “one chai tea, please. ”The barista's busy eyes glaze. “WE'LL BRING YOUR ORDER RIGHT OUT TO YOU,” she says at our foreigner. We squirm like new parents, all eyes on her disobedient fingers, tea sloshing on a napkin as she talks of TV shows, poetry. For an hour we admire her onyx eyes, her sun-kissed shoulders; then we must return to jobs, lives and loves. We watch as she rolls away, out of our helpless hands into partitioned dreams.
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