Lack a Silver Lining

By Andrew T. Hurd

Chapter 1: Apricot Tea

There was a sense of regret on each face, the city was depressed. Between rain, and what felt real. Seth pushed his glasses up his nose as he walked through downtown’s thick November fog, the grease and grime were highlighted in the twilight weather. He walked through the middle of the street in an uncaring fashion. The streets were almost to narrow for cars to drive through with the size they had reached. The skies ruptured spitting their seed to the earth, and bathing it in the oil and grime that had become of the land. Seth looked up to the sky, arms spread and said “Fucking great” to the skies. The water made steam come off of a nearby manhole cover.
The man saw little beauty in the world around him, a cynic, he only saw how vile he thought it was. He was not a man without taste, though. He thought that humanity was capable of great things. His iPod was blasting one of them into his ears from a safely nestled home in his pocket, the Decemberists’ music playing. Music was his escape from the world, since he’d found a life in writing. To him, there was not much enjoyment in something once he could analyze it for its parts. That left music as his only pleasure outside of human contact, which he sought to correct by taking psychology classes.
He stuffed his hands deep into his hoodie pockets, the black fabrics only divided down the middle by a shiny metal zipper. He did not see a point in pulling up the hood, it was just polyester and cotton, it would not help enough to keep the rain away.
His blue eyes gazed down the empty road to a small, corner coffee shop. His shoe touched the wet tan of the rough sidewalk that was nary two feet from the building before he opened the door. The only person there was an unfamiliar female Barista, probably due to the fact it was nearly seven at night, and Seth figured that by this point everyone had there fill of coffee before getting some decent alcohol in there systems.
He leaned on the counter as he looked to the girl. She was obviously Hispanic in decent, even though her hair was only a couple of inches long with a graduation in the back. That struck Seth as weird, it was not that she could not have that hair style, he told himself, it just was atypical. Any thought of that being a hairstyle she could not have put a quick and noticeable level of disgust into his head.
He sighed it off, which caught her attention, which had previously been on a laptop that he could hear her typing away on. His disgruntled look made him seem like he was put-off by how long she was taking. This caused a scowl to come across her face as brown eyes looked to him from behind thin black frames. “Sorry to keep you waiting” She said in a wry tone. This caught Seth by surprise, since he had not noticed what he had done.
He looked around the coffee shop, wondering if he had done something to offend her, before realizing his faux pas. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to come across as rude,” He said trying to do some form of damage control. The fact that a smirk appeared on her earth-tone lips made him feel like a burden had been lifted, even though he usually was not one to care about the thoughts others cast upon him.
She stretched behind the counter, knuckles cracking as the girl held them high above her head. “It’s fine” she said in a stressed tone before returning to a relaxed state, where, with a sigh of relief, she said “what’ll it be?”The Barista had a soft, melodic voice. It was obvious just from a few words and the look on her face that she had a forgiving nature, something Seth admired in his closed and jaded view of the world.
He looked above her crown of shiny black hair to the green blackboard behind her. “Hmmm...” He pondered stroking a tuft of a goatee on his chin, “Let’s go with a black coffee and a cake” He said, taking a pastry from the nearby metal wire rack. A prepackaged slice was all that he would have to carbo load for the night.
“Will you be eating it too?” The Barista girl quipped by with a cute grin upon her lips.
He chose not to find it funny, even if he wanted to laugh at her joke. He said a faux-serious “That’s not funny” while she leaned into him.
“Well, I think it is,” She said, smile still on her full lips. She grazed his arm with her hand as she went to prepare his order. Seth was far from the best at reading any form of signs that led to him asking someone to go out with him, but he was not an idiot either. He could tell, for whatever unfathomable reason, Sylvia was interested.
As she placed it in front of him, she looked up expectantly. The girl wanted him to ask her even just to sit down and have a coffee with him while there was no one else there. The Barista wanted a chance to get to know someone in a land that was foreign to her. She had just moved to the city, and she did not know anyone. Even if she could tell that this man was obviously anti-social, everything needed to start somewhere.
“So um...” He said, picking up his drink and pastry, “Would you... Would you like to sit with me?”
She smiled at the offer, looking down into her hands to hide her face. “Well, I might get busy...” She began, trailing off to seem like she was not too desperate for someone to talk to and get to know.
Before she could continue he promptly interrupted saying: “Look, if you don’t want to, fine.” He headed toward the door, which caused the girl to make a mad dash over the counter, resulting in a thud as she  fell face down on the floor. “Holy shit!” he yelled as he placed his food and drink down and moved to her, “Are you okay?!”
She rolled over, eyes flitting open; he helped her up, making sure she was alright as he did. “Look, I’m sorry about that, I’m new in town... Ya know what, never mind” She said unlocking the half door that led to behind the counter. She held her forehead with her hand, acting like it was just sore, even though it was because of a surmounting self-doubt.
He caught her shoulder with his hand and told her “I’d love to sit and have a cup of coffee with you. This’ll learn ya not to play hard to get” He smirked a wry grin as she looked back to him, folding her arms over her chest with an eye brow arched.
“Well...” She said, still going behind the counter, but leaving the door open. “Let me grab my apricot tea and I’ll sit with you. By the way, I’m Sylvia Riviera-Diaz, and you are?” She said, extending a hand from behind the counter to shake hands with him.
He took her soft hand in his, moving it up and down twice for a shake. “Name’s Seth Gaiman” He said with a smile on his lips. Sylvia took her hand back to grab her apricot tea before hurrying back to sit with Seth.
They sat across from one another, exchanging pleasantries. She would ask where he went to school, and he would respond and ask her the same thing. As it turned out, crossing paths really would have been inevitable for them. Seth remarked that it was kind of surprising they should meet in a coffee shop rather than on campus. He was a creative writing major, she was an artist, and for someone with a pension for the Sequential Arts like Seth, that’s a winning combination.
They talked for a time, learning about each other, mostly the inconsequential things, but enough to make them have a solid base to start talking on. They joked, they mused, Seth ranted, Sylvia retorted, they laughed, but most importantly, they built something. There was something between them that both of them had long since abandoned belief in. Even though they both made no mention of anything they thought might isolate them from the other.
They drifted in one another, keeping close yet as distant as they could. Insecure because of the moment and the fact that they might have something, they finally turned away from one another, questioning themselves and any potential a relationship could have. Even a friendship could mean forcing themselves to be on the line more than they wanted. It was only a brief moment, but a moment of the utmost personal reflection, questioning self-worth.
Seth’s mind was absorbed in flashes of the past. Of moments where he ruined everything to do with a person by being pedantic and arrogant, and often described as a “jack ass”. His eyes were back set with black bags beneath them, looking to her weakly, and in his mind, pathetically. He worried if he was even capable of being anyone’s friend; his few friends would probably agree that he had such high standards for what it means to be a human being, let alone a serviceable friend, that he was incapable of truly caring about anyone. His friend Lily would deny that, saying she thought he was capable of caring about people, just not himself, which translated to him being incapable of caring about others. Seth liked that one more, it felt somehow less degrading.
All the while Sylvia was worried about meeting anyone. It was more of an issue of feeling accepted. She had abandoned herself back in Tampa, even more so when she came to Pittsburgh and cut her hair that once reached the small of her back. She was reinterpreting the person she had become, where she had come from, and why she was there. She was always an intellectual, in college on a full scholarship, which was good since she came from a “working” class family. She was now an activist, more at home in a debate than in her own skin, which troubled her in some instances. She knew politics were important to people, but it was always horrifying to find out just how important they could be. She was afraid of the fact she was an activist liberal and after a few days knowing her, she knew most people would see her complaining about something in politics and how some people mock the constitution. Sylvia wished that Seth was not one of those people who faulted her for being opinionated.
Finally Sylvia broke the brief seconds silence and doubt were broken, “Seth, will you consider me a friend?” She asked quite bluntly. She could never be blamed for lack of trying. Her dark brown eyes looked to him from behind glasses, the whites of her eyes standing out more, though, with the dark tan color of her skin matched with short ebony hair. Her lower lip sunk behind her teeth as she waited for an answer in cautious optimism.
Seth’s reply, though typical of him by the virtue of his friend’s knowledge, was not what Sylvia necessarily was hoping to hear. It was a resounding “No.” For a minute, he actually held that, Sylvia holding her apricot tea up to her, acting like she was drinking it to seem nonchalant. He finally qualified his answer by saying, “But I’d love to get to know you better, and we’ll be friends in no time. I had to say that to get you back for earlier.” A smirk grew upon his lips, distorting the goatee which surrounded them.
She shot him a cross look, folding her arms over her chest. “My falling on face wasn’t pay back enough?” She said with a bit of a laugh echoing in her last words.
Seth’s smirk changed into a half smile, as he rubbed the back of his head with one hand, shaking it a bit. He complimented it by saying, “Well, that’s true, but now I owe you some form of torture. Happy? We’ll be even” He said, his look turning into an unnoticed smile as his eyes rested upon Sylvia.
The moment broke when the cynic noticed the time, it was getting late, so he needed to leave. “Sylvia, I wrote down my number and my e-mail on a napkin, so call me or something some time, that was we can hang out some time,” He said to her with as much of a smile as his underused muscles could. Sylvia picked it up with a smile on her face, looking to him with a coy grin.
As Seth left, Sylvia returned behind the counter, thinking about what had just happened, how she finally had a friend in a world that was other wise foreign to her. At least some form of a friend. So what if it was grossly apparent that Seth was not the nicest person the world have ever seen? He was somewhere to start coming out of her shell. Somewhere to start conquering her fears that had been impacted on her back in Tampa.
Sylvia sipped her apricot tea, thinking about her past. She leaned on the counter, looking down her body as it faced the wall. Her dark tan skin tight over bones of chalk, save for a collective of scars that marred her otherwise perfect complexion. Her cold lithe hand pressed against one on her shoulder, unnoticeable under her white t-shirt. It served as a reminder for how cruel other people could be, and how naive she could be.
Her dark brown eyes shut tight, black hair falling before her glasses. “New city. New state. New people. New me” She said to herself, trying to come up with some facsimile of a mantra to remember who she had become. She looked to the phone number Seth gave her, using it as a reminder of how things could be different. How things would be different.