The Lonely Man in the Cafe

Amman, Jordan.

A man with a pipe needs no friends. He needs only a quiet night and an empty table. His smoke forms the men who would otherwise join him, but these ghosts of men do not restrain his thoughts as real men would. Rather they are the objects of his meditation, the substance of his reverie.

A man enters places that men never go.

He had a home once, now he has a house. His home is in another country—across a still river—but he has not been there in many years. In moments like these, when he sits alone and blows smoke-rings around his thoughts—weaving himself in a smokey matrix of memory—he can remember Palestine.

A son waits a few streets away. He does not know that his father is here, lost in memories he's never had, and walking through streets whose names he's never learned. Because to the son the memories of the father have become legend. And in this legend our hero is aging, fatigued, and lost. He is turning the key he's saved for generations into the door that was buried generations ago—beneath a hill beside his grandfather's grave.

The smoke rolls through the air like the green hills once did when they rested upon the clouds of paradise. Paradise has fallen, but thrives in the dreamer's ken.

Oh David! My house for yours,
And my son for Absalom?
May he forsake me, may he take me,
But no home but mine for him!