The guy eating alone is reading a book called Never Eat Alone, the yolk of his poached eggs robeing his plate in orange, and I am jealous because I am hungry and his hair looks like how I would want mine to look if I still felt like a boy sometimes.

The woman seated behind him is nearly done with a hardcover titled WAR.

I’ve been meaning to go to B&H since I moved to the city because when pierogis call I will always run to them. It’s got three tables and signs everywhere that say NO GUNS NO PHONES. Yesterday I showed up and it was closed so I got a bagel around the corner instead. I was angry. My bagel was unmagic. I sat on a dirty red bench and watched a pigeon go at a gull on the curb. The gull wanted the pizza the pigeon was eating, but the pigeon clearly just wanted to get a hit or two in. I watched them dance around each other and thought about violence. They were so beautiful in the sun.

The closest I’ve come to going at a gull: kneeing a guy for putting his hand down my pants at a club, kneeing a different guy for something worse, and what happened at a single jiu-jitsu lesson I took when I was eight, back in Oregon. I don’t like thinking about the first two things so I kicked my toes into the sidewalk and thought about the third. The instructor was named Pete and he was really skinny and he smelled like the inside of an airplane. The first thing he taught us that day was how to sit. Never lean back on your hands with your elbows locked, he said, because someone could jab you on the inside of your elbow/s and then you’d be flat on your back and totally cooked.

“Can we get to the interesting stuff?” someone said.

Pete, who I’d decided was God, rolled his eyes and told us to pair up.

“Now,” he said, “fight.”

We beat the crap out of each other, which was awesome until I coughed up blood (only a little) in the backseat of my mom’s 2007 Honda Civic on the ride home. I missed the window spitting it out but sank the shot on the suits she’d just grabbed back from the dry cleaners. She didn’t let me take another lesson. I hated her for this up until the moment I developed hindsight and critical thinking, which happened at exactly 12:08 AM in my prom date’s motel suite when I was seventeen. The weight of the entire world and the sensation of his hands on my waist hit me like a semi and I threw up on his chest — the shirt was gone but the silk tie wasn’t — and then I blurted out that I was moving to New York, and hey, maybe this wasn’t going to work.

“Do you hate me?” he asked, doe-eyed, margarita pulp tangled up in his chest hair. It looked like wet kelp.

“Yes,” I said. “But it’s not your fault.”

“Everyone always leaves me,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

Back in B&H, a pair of warm arms carry a bowl of borscht to me without care for what someone could do to their locked joints.

I watch the woman finish WAR while I wait for it to cool.