Déjà Vu
by Kris Green
Ash flakes off my cigarette and flies with the wind as it turns and comes back to my face. I wipe it but feel it smear on my cheek. I wince as I’m not embarrassed, not yet, but I know it’s coming.
I rise and walk over to the kiosk with condiments and straws, leaving my cigarette burning on the table. I grab a handful of napkins, intending to use the condensation from my iced coffee to wet and clean my cheek, when I see her.
Is it free will that compels my steps? Or am I stuck on an endless loop forever as an indentured servant to the cosmos? I am made of stars and galaxies, as are you. I am as much a part of infinity as anyone who reads this.
Today is my favorite day, though, despite being the 23,762nd day of my entire life. From my own Big Bang to the way I die, still 37 years from now, this is it. Reduced to these little moments of cosmology, most of my life is a mixture of déjà vu and repetition, except when I am with her.
She smiles at my cheek, and while I am instantly enamored, I do believe in love at first sight, but what is this now, 10, 12 times? I don’t know. I’ve lost count. It’s been such a long time since I figured everything out, and frankly, I don’t know if I’ll ever really know what is going on. Maybe this is the hundredth time? Either way, the moment captures me, and I fill with love as if it’s the first.
One of these reiterations early on, when I tried to tell my friend Steve in high school, he said it was like the movie “Groundhog Day.” Bill Murray’s character knew he was on a loop, trying to find a way to break the endless cycle. I stumbled on it, and as it continued, it took me who knows how many lifetimes to figure it out.
“It’s a good movie, right?” Steve asks.
“How many times have you seen it?”
“Twenty?”
“It’s kind of like that. I feel like I’m watching the same movie repeatedly, and sometimes I don’t know the dialogue or the plot, and sometimes I do. But instead of a day or a 2-hour movie, it’s my whole life.”
“What happens to me?” Every person wants to know.
Our friendship didn’t last too long after high school. Some people orbit your life; others shoot off like asteroids into the great unknown.
Annie smiles at me, her eyes keenly on my ashen cheek. I stare at the long lavender strand of hair that I have spent such a long time thinking about, when it is such a simple story that she’ll tell me two years from now in passing, as it gets brought up. The rest of her hair, auburn, resembles the last shade of orange leaves turn in the fall before fading to a deep brown. The night in question, the night before she was born into my life, her friends had tried to push her to do something different. Poking and prodding and a plethora of suggestions that may or may not have been crude, they landed on a streak of hair color.
Annie looks away as most women do when you gaze at them like I have. She opens the door to the small coffee bistro, and it jingles behind me. I hurry to the napkin, wipe my face, and grab my notebook and copy of Whitman’s “Song of Myself” into my green Toyota. I grab the apron from the backseat and head into the shop two minutes behind her.
I can change some of my conversations with people, but not all. I can change some of my actions, but not all. At first, I thought this could be some form of purgatory. Now, I’m not so sure. I’ve been lost in an extended loop. It’s also not like I can remember everything. Some things are familiar, and things that I know are going to happen, but the mundane, the trivial, the day-to-day things happening, feel new even though I know they’re not.
Greg waves me over when I walk into the coffee shop. “What are you grinning at?”
I’m trying not to smile like an idiot. I shrug, playing dumb. I reach my hand out to Annie.
“Kyle will train you today,” Greg says. “This is Annie.”
“Got it, boss,” I say so definitively that Greg shrugs and turns his back on us.
I float in a celestial space of all things I could say or have said. Galaxies spin around me as I orbit the planet of all possibilities. Unable to change my course, I know that most things will not work out as planned. I’ve tried saying all the different things that have come across my heart, but none of them have ever worked.
“We’re going to get married one day.”
“I like the purple streak.”
“Greg’s being nice now, but he’ll say something about your hair soon.”
Nothing ever works.
I inhale as I float past clouds of purple space dust with holes poked out of it and shining stars, auburn and glittering, that could easily be light bulbs from a Lite Brite toy. Every rebirth, my heart is shaken like an Etch-A-Sketch for it to be redrawn again. Everything old feels fresh and new, and even the impending heartache feels good.
“Well,” after an unsteady breath, “Let’s check out the schedule.”
I see her smile, and we walk around to the clipboard hanging in the back. The schedule with assignments is laid out for the day. She looks and doesn’t catch my stare. Of all the things I can say, there’s nothing. She will never marry me; she’ll never be anything more than a friend. She will ruin my life.
I walk the back of the bar, showing her each machine as an old Third Eye Blind song plays, wishing that I would step back from the edge. I’m there, though, I’m trying not to leap.
We talk about how each machine works, and I show her the cheat notes for the different kinds of coffee.
“After a week or two, you won’t even look at it. There are rush times, but right now it’s slow. Good time to learn.”
“I’ll have an iced chai latte.”
“We got it,” I tell Frank, who doesn’t seem to care if we or anyone else got the order.
The song changes to Radiohead, and I close my eyes after I point at the cheat sheet. Annie follows the sheet easily. She’s brilliant and won’t have any trouble doing so as I mouth the words: “And I’m a creep; I don’t belong here.”
I don’t know if she sees the tear that leaks out and hangs at the bottom of my eyelids. I wipe away. Resigned, not even trying now. I’ve tried to be charming. I’m starting up conversations on topics I know she likes. The celestial laws have decreed that nothing is to happen, and I surrender to it.
“So, am I in some kind of loop?” Steve had asked.
“That, or it’s just me, and you’re all along for the ride.” Of everyone, Steve is the only person who I ever thought would understand.
“I’m having the weirdest déjà vu right now.” She turns to me.
“Yeah.” Resigned to give up trying. “It happens. Now we wash the container in this.”
“Where’s the other one?”
I look at her. I hadn’t mentioned storage or backup ones, and this feels like a new question. Nothing is resonating inside like an itch unable to scratch.
“In storage.”
“Can you show me?”
Red lights are flashing in my head, but I don’t know if this is just something new or maybe a loop that I can’t touch yet. Usually, things don’t change; it’s just things I forget. But this feels…
“Here.” I open the closet door and step inside.
She follows. I can smell her light scent and look away. At other times, I’ve tried to get another job. I’ve tried to find a way away from her, but I always end up coming back. I don’t know how much of reality is firm and how much of it is flexible, but the universe feels like a rubber band stretching out before it snaps back into place.
She looks up at me as I say something stupid like: “This box has straws.”
“I know you.”
I tremble as she says it. I’m stuck in the dark places of the solar system when the sunlight refuses to shine. It’s a random asteroid comment; it doesn’t mean anything.
“Yes,” The smile comes naturally as the joke emerges, “We met like two hours ago.”
“No. I know you.”
Her hand comes up, and fingers go from my forehead to my chin, caressing across the three days of scruff. It’ll be another 7 years before I can grow anything like a beard. She laughs, and I can see something violent in her eyes. Something as if a fire is being built up and spreading, as if she knows the very things I know.
“I know you. We’ve done this before.”
“Not this,” I tell her, “Not exactly.”
“No,” she almost giggles.
I think of kissing her, but as I lean in, she puts her finger over my lips. Then laughs. She’s done that before, and she knows it. She knows it.
Three years from now, we’re roommates.
We’re both intoxicated. I try to kiss her. She puts her finger over my lips, with that knowing smile, and shakes her head back and forth. Friends shouldn’t kiss.
The black hole that had been gathering momentum explodes before absorbing the sun.
“What is this?” She asks, and I go to turn away. I think maybe if she remembers, she’ll remember how she doesn’t….
“Don’t leave.”
My back is to her. I don’t know what to say. I had a theory once, however many renditions ago, that if I kissed her, the spell would be broken. Maybe life would stop on repeat. Maybe something would change. Am I stuck in Groundhog Day? No, because I don’t remember everything, and I don’t know how I remember so much.
“Listen, we need to get back.”
“Okay.” Her voice is small suddenly. But her eyes don’t let go of the thought.
She walks up to me, and as she starts to pass me in the hallway, I just know. I see the world and all the things that have ever mattered drifting away as if the world were going to crumble. I grab her arm. She starts but doesn’t pull away. She looks up at me, and I can see her eyes staring into mine.
My lips press against hers. I can taste the coffee she drank. The first kiss, the most daring and dangerous, as I pull away, she pulls in. My hands find her back and pull her closer. I can feel her, and I tremble, but I almost laugh, feeling her tremble too.
The universe is boiling in a pot on the stove of creation before exploding out. Spinning out, the universe in fury, creates new worlds and life together. Covering the Creator with its stew of life and making a mess of all things. Life begins anew. Whitman is still echoing in my head, telling me that every atom belonging to me is also in you.
I can’t help but laugh as I pull back, panting. There are no words to say. Our hands are holding.
“Well,” she says in a soft chuckle, “That was new.”
Kris Green lives in Florida with his beautiful wife and two savage children. He’s been published over 80 times in the last few years by the wonderful people at Nifty Lit, The Haberdasher: Peddlers of Literary Art, In Parentheses Magazine, Route 7 Review, BarBar Magazine, and many more. He won the 2023 Barbe Best Short Story and Reader’s Choice Award for his short story, “Redemption.”