Girl in the Cafe - The Woman Sees Irving Yalom

 I wrote a brief synopsis of an encounter in a cafe, between two dog owners.   The event was real, but I asked Chat GPT to revisit it as essays in the voice of five authors - Irving Yalom (psychiatrist), Oliver Sacks (neurologist), and three essayists, Joan Didion (American), Julian Barnes (English), and Thomas Mann (German).

Table of Contents - https://bqoccasionalessays.blogspot.com/2026/03/girl-in-cafe-melrose-5-versions-table.html

A few days later, I asked the Irving Yalom avatar to re-tell the story, but this time, from the woman's point of view.

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Air Signs, Revisited

She came in on a Thursday afternoon, a few minutes early, carrying the faint restlessness of someone who wasn’t entirely sure why she had made the appointment. Late twenties, she told me. Designer. Working increasingly with AI. “I’m not… in crisis,” she said quickly, almost preemptively. “It’s just—something happened. Or maybe nothing happened. I can’t quite tell.”

I have learned to listen carefully when a patient insists that nothing happened.

“It was small,” she said. “A taco place. I had my dog with me.”

I waited.

“There was this man. Older—much older. Maybe late sixties. He had a dog too. So we started talking, like you do.”

She smiled briefly, as if acknowledging the familiar script. Dogs, I thought, often serve as intermediaries—safe conduits into contact that might otherwise feel too exposed.

“But it didn’t stop,” she continued. “You know how those conversations usually go? Thirty seconds, maybe a minute. This went on. Ten minutes. Maybe more.”

“And that was unusual for you?”

“Not just unusual. It felt… different. Like we skipped something.”

“Skipped what?”

She paused. “The part where you decide not to care.”

That interested me.

She described the progression with some care: the dogs, the names, then work—hers in design and technology, his in consulting—and the unexpected overlap around artificial intelligence. He told her about making parody videos. “It should have been weird,” she said. “It wasn’t. It was actually… kind of great.”

“Great how?”

“He was just there. Present. Not trying to impress me, not awkward. Just… engaged.”

I noted the word.

“At one point,” she went on, “I asked if I could guess his zodiac sign. I don’t even know why I did that. I don’t usually do that.”

“Why do you think you did?”

She considered. “It was a way of… crossing a line, maybe. But a safe one. Like, I could make it a joke.”

“And when you guessed correctly?”

She smiled again, this time more slowly. “He lit up. It was sweet. He made this little gesture—like a high five—and I touched his hand. And I just… didn’t pull away right away.”

She looked at me, as if checking whether this required explanation.

“What was that like for you?” I asked.

“It felt natural,” she said. “Not sexual. Not even really flirtatious. Just… connection. But also a little charged. Like something was there.”

She used the same word he had: something.

“And then?” I asked.

“Then it kept going. We talked about a script I’m working on. About L.A. in the future. He mentioned a bakery nearby—I go there all the time. It was weird. Like we were already in each other’s orbit but hadn’t met.”

She stopped, and for a moment we sat in silence.

“And how did it end?”

“My food was ready. Or his was. I don’t remember exactly. One of us got called. He said, ‘Hope to see you again.’ And that was it.”

“And since then?”

She exhaled. “I keep thinking about it. Not him, exactly. I mean, yes, him—but not like that. It’s more… the feeling.”

“The feeling?”

“That it could have gone somewhere. Or that it used to, in other situations. But this time it didn’t. And I didn’t want it to, really. But also—” She hesitated. “Also, I kind of did.”

This ambivalence is familiar territory.

“What do you imagine might have happened if it had ‘gone somewhere’?” I asked.

She laughed softly. “That’s the thing. I don’t. I mean, he’s married. He’s decades older. It’s not a real scenario.”

“Yet you’re still thinking about it.”

“Yes.”

We sat with that.

“I think,” she said slowly, “it’s because it felt so easy. And that doesn’t happen that often. Not like that. Usually there’s… effort. Or calculation. Or you’re wondering what the other person wants. With him, it was just… happening.”

“And that was appealing.”

“Yeah. It was.”

I found myself wondering what she had brought into the room that made such an encounter possible. It is rarely one-sided. We create these moments together, though we often attribute them to the other person.

“What do you think he experienced?” I asked.

She considered this more seriously.

“I think he enjoyed it,” she said. “I think he was a little surprised. But also comfortable. Like he knew how to be in that kind of moment.”

She paused.

“And I think… he chose not to take it further.”

“How do you feel about that?”

She tilted her head slightly. “Relieved. And also a little disappointed.”

“Both.”

“Yeah. Both.”

There it was—the paradox we encounter so often: the desire for connection paired with the desire for containment. To have the moment, but not its consequences.

“I think,” she said after a while, “it reminded me of something.”

“What?”

“That these moments exist. That you can just… meet someone. And it works. Even if nothing happens after.”

She looked at me more directly now.

“I guess I thought that kind of thing only led to something, or it didn’t matter. But maybe it can just… be what it is.”

I nodded.

In my work, I often see patients struggle with the idea that meaning must be tied to outcome—that a connection is valuable only if it develops, that a beginning must lead somewhere to justify itself. Yet much of life, I have come to believe, consists of precisely these contained encounters—moments of genuine meeting that do not extend, and do not need to.

“You’re holding onto the feeling,” I said, “not because you lost something, but because you found something.”

She was quiet for a moment.

“Yes,” she said finally. “That sounds right.”

As the session drew to a close, she mentioned, almost casually, that she sometimes worked at a bakery near where the encounter had taken place.

“Maybe I’ll see him again,” she said.

“And if you do?”

She smiled. “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll ask about the videos.”

She stood, gathering her things, the restlessness that had accompanied her arrival now softened, if not entirely resolved.

After she left, I found myself thinking about the man, whom I would never meet, and the brief intersection of two lives that had, for a moment, aligned. Neither had pursued it. Neither had needed to.

And yet both had carried it forward.

There are, I am reminded, many forms of connection. Not all of them demand continuation. Some serve simply to reveal—to each participant—their own capacity to meet another, fully, even briefly, in the present moment.