Roman Tragedy
I’ve written a contemporary version below:
I met a woman thirteen days ago.
Venus works in the same company as I do and sits across me on the right with an aisle separating our work stations. My desk is located on the left wall and hers is one of the desks by The Island, as I would like to call it. She shares a long desk with three other people from Accounts. The Island is her home and there is an ocean between us.
The first time I met Venus, she made me laugh. She never once made eye contact with me but conversed with the intern who, at that time, was drunk enough to want to talk to me. This was how we met and how I learned of her name. During those fifteen minutes that she animatedly told us about how she met her boyfriend, her cheeks were flushed with pink and her skin was glowing in the early moonlight. It wasn’t love, most definitely. Admiration could probably be the right word for it.
Venus is a dozen years my senior. But her poise and her complexion never gave away her real age. She was a classic beauty and the real beauty about it was, she never thought of herself that way. Venus is, safe to say, a goddess.
One afternoon as I was busily typing away on my laptop she came to my side and placed her hand on my desk and leaned on it. I turned my head in her direction but my eyes were still glued on the laptop screen. When I was finally able to peel them off from work, it landed on her bosom which was staring right at my face.
“Do I smell?” she asked.
I was too stunned to speak. I moved my eyebrows which, I hoped, would give an impression that I was confused because I really was.
“I have this meeting later on and,” she waved her arms on her side fanning the wind to my direction while her breasts jiggled on her low-neck black top, “we ate lunch in this coffee place and there was smoke and I’m afraid the smell stuck to my clothes.”
Honestly, her breasts distracted me, not that I was a breast person. But if you ever saw one bounce up and down just inches from your face, you’d get distracted. Trust me on this, I know. So when she realized that my opinion was only going to either confirm or deny the reality of which she already knew, she proceeded to walk away from my desk and into The Island.
For a few seconds I just sat there looking at her from across her desk. I repositioned myself and resumed work. Come to think of it, if she hadn’t up and left so quickly, I would’ve brought my face closer to her and took a good sniff (at her breasts, I realized, since those were in very close proximity) and decided that whatever she smelled like it really didn’t matter because her presence alone was already a breath of fresh air.
- by Sappho
