Humorously unavailable.

I strongly believe that I am forever unavailable for anyone; like a reserved table in an abandoned bistro where the owner went bankrupt and her family had fled away to Siberia three months before the World War II ended. It was a nice little restaurant; it served good Mexican food even though the cook was once a farmer from North Carolina. He cooked and seasoned and never yelled in the kitchen. The woman who opened the bistro to make a living paid the cook fifty dollars every day, and he said he was happy with that. He could buy beer at a liquor store in the town where he was a regular customer and a drinking buddy of the son of the manager, just so he could get a half-priced 6 pack of Corona. He said it was the best drink he had ever had since he was a little kid. Maybe he was lying, but at the same time, listeners had to consider a possibility that maybe what he said was nothing but the truth (his truth, still). The cook, chrysanthemums in porcelain vases, indistinguishable scents of food being tasted, raindrops on the windows, storms emerged from the horizon, fluorescent air, quiescent waves of laughter of the youngest daughter of the woman who owned the bistro, everything, everything, and then, we saw the table in the farthest corner. That was a small and round table. The woman bought it from a peddler on the street. He had been to Casablanca, and when he came back, there was this table on his truck. He tapped his forehead, he said, “Milady, you would love this. The table, you can see, is skillfully crafted. I got it from a temple, people used to put fresh cut hyacinths on it during a festival where they celebrated a no-named goddess. You see, I know, you would love it as much as she did.” The woman brought the table back to her bistro. The peddler refused the cash that she thought he would want to take. He murmured under the hot breath of a summer day – and it was the first of July: the air was as thick as a spoonful of wildflower honey – that “Milady, take it. That was what the goddess said.” So she took it, and placed it in a corner where no one but her could ever see it. She was gone, because of the war, but the table was not moved even just an inch, as if the goddess had come, and hid it under her silky black dress.