"Hey" (fiction)

For her, life was a constant juxtaposition of the minutiae and the big picture. Was she supposed to be driven to her knees when, walking up Granville Street one Friday afternoon after work she overheard an attractive young man answer his cell phone with an intimate “Hey”, from which she inferred that he knew the caller, and from the gruff gentleness of his voice further inflected that this was the woman that he wanted, possibly loved, that was calling him or returning his call and the nakedness of his want of her given his simple monosyllabic utterance was as plain as her own breath which misted in front of her? Or was that irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, and was it more worth her while to concentrate on something more tangible like melting polar ice caps and the idiocy of water bottles? She had yet to come to the realization that those small, precious moments were ones that you witnessed and kept and harkened back to when trying to understand the greater and grander tumultuousness of a world that saw people paying four dollars for a coffee every day, while decrying the encroachment of social housing within their comfort zone.
A lover once expressed, “It’s all or nothing with you”. She believed that, but didn’t understand why this was necessarily so, nor did she particularly believe that this was an incorrect way of approaching relationships. She wanted all. Otherwise she preferred nothing. She took issue when men indicated that women were hard to read. She didn’t believe that she had ever been anything other than succinct and to the point. Possibly men needed more of a transition phase. More time spent languishing in her underwear instead of going from fully clothed to decorously naked.
She questioned a lot of things, a lot of perceptions. When she walked by the legless, homeless man in his wheelchair, begging for spare change at Lonsdale and 15th she felt a twinge of fear, a discomfort that came with being confronted by the unknown. She questioned that: what did she have to fear from a homeless, legless man? At what point in her life was it interjected into her belief system that she ought to be wary of this person? Why was he more or less dangerous than the CEO of a multinational corporation that she had worked for that had relegated one of her employees to sit outside his transparent office because she was pleasing to look at? More or less dangerous than the father of one of her first boyfriends that would stroke her bronzed forearm when her boyfriend left the room and would later, after she had left her boyfriend, call her while drunk to tell her what an ethereal and beautiful girl she was?
She never knew what to do. Should she quit her job to volunteer with a humanitarian effort in Darfur? She was often overwrought after watching a particular movie, reading a certain book, listening to a specific song. Why did everyone around her seem so staid and disaffected? Did no one want to wrench open their windows and bellow to the world their anguish, their happiness, their passion?
She took the sea bus home that day and gazed out the window at the grey, churning sea and felt diminished as they passed by one of the gargantuan freighters anchored there. She took in the vessel’s inhabitants, listening to their iPods, reading their books, some with their eyes closed in a semi-conscious daze, all the while their feet scant inches from the feet of their fellow passengers, each sitting on the belts of the other’s coats, umbrellas knocking against someone else’s knees, eyes meeting and averting.
On the bus she smelled the pungent tobacco scent that lingered on the man next to whom she sat. He tried to pull away from her, to shrink against the window but failed. His hand were rough, his clothing worn, he did not move or cough or answer his cell phone with a familiar “Hey” during the ride up the hill.
She bounded off the bus, noticed her fellow passengers disembark, heads down while heading certainly, definitively in well laid out routes and directions: with purpose. She affected the same gait. Purposeful. Where was she going? Where did she have to be?
She gave two dollars to the legless man and said, “I walk past you almost every day. I’m Patricia: what’s your story?”