When I managed to calm down, I realized Martin was right. I was a woman of science; a researcher. A woman of arguments, facts and reason. How could I allow heartbreak -so common it would be a cliché if it weren’t happening to me- turn me into a furiously raving lunatic without cure?

I walked out, sat at the counter and ordered coffee from a waitress so immersed in conversation with the colleague who mass-made sandwiches at her side, she barely noticed me.

“And then I told him, “Look here, mijito… What are you thinking? That I’m a 24-hour fast food sex window available at your convenience? No, baby. You’re wrong. Te equivocaste.”

“Very mistaken,” nodded the other waitress. “Better lonely que mal acompañada,” she added as she simultaneously spread butter on six Cuban toasts with a resigned expression on her face.

Had my best friend Lola been there, she’d have said I was attracting the very thing I was suffering from. You know, the radiations of negative thought and all that hooey.

But there must have been some truth to her theory because in the forty-five minutes it took me to drink four Cuban coffees and two bottled waters, I saw…

FROM THE DESK OF ERIKA LUNA:

1. A young guy begging his girlfriend for another chance using a cell phone that lost his call five times during the 10 minutes he was waiting for a breaded steak dinner.
   
   
2. A depressed-looking pregnant woman pretending not to notice her husband turning around one hundred and eighty degrees to observe the ample behind of a woman ordering a pan con lechón sandwich and a malted milkshake.
   
   
3. At least five people walking past the cafeteria’s entrance with the automated sprint of the being fed up with life, and the same empty stare that had made me cry when I’d seen it staring back at me in the cafeteria bathroom mirror just minutes before.

Too many samples of the bad substance, as they say in my line of work. Or maybe it wasn’t that I was attracting that which I was going through. Perhaps this was just the way things were: a world full of malfunctioning, broken hearts ambling around, that had gone unnoticed by me because I’d been too occupied living in my hip yuppie love bubble, located right in the center of a house that was always being painted, extended, decorated or improved.