“Just what it sounds like, and then I’m leaving with my friends,” she said, holding a cigarette in one hand and arranging slices of cheese and sausage on bread with the other.
“You’re leaving... with your friends?” he asked, frowning, putting two cups of coffee on the table, black for himself and with cream for her.
She remained silent, sliding the sandwiches closer to him, taking her coffee, and climbing onto a chair with her feet. During their time together, their shared morning coffee had long become a habit, with each having their own role – he brewed the coffee and she made the sandwiches, and both remained silent. As he believed, they both liked it that way – just the morning, just coffee, just the two of them.
But today, she broke their mutual silence with the statement that she was packing her things and leaving him. “Is that all you have to say?” she finally asked.
“Annoying,” he replied.
“Just annoying?”
He ate his sandwich with a sullen expression, trying to come up with a more appropriate response to the situation. But it was really just annoying to him – not hurtful, not bitter, not sad.
He tried to figure out why it was like this, as if their time together would leave nothing behind but annoyance. He remembered how they met – the pretty brunette was standing in front of his photograph at an exhibition, looking at it with a touching childlike enthusiasm, not even trying to hide it.
He approached her and said, “Do you like it?”
“What?” she looked at him, and he liked her best for that scattered thoughtfulness. Their subsequent acquaintance was just a formality that eventually faded from memory.
The next morning, they drank coffee in his kitchen, silently staring at each other. No one else in his life had ever been so quiet and looked at him the way she did. Today, she looked out the window, where weak autumn sun tried to break through the morning’s gray clouds.
All this time, she waited for him to leave this concrete city, and take her to that wonderful world – the world that lured her from all his photographs taken during his travels around the world in search of a successful shot, as he called it.
But every day it became increasingly clear that he had no intention of going anywhere, that he was perfectly content with this morning, this coffee, her silence. She looked at him questioningly again.
Feeling even more disappointed that he had nothing else to add, he replied:
"Yes, just annoying..."
