I pull a chair out at a table in the corner and sit down quick then slunch over the menu and make myself non-assuming as possible. The waitress, in her black tee that says bike week 06 and tight curly black hair and lined eyes looks me over once and doesn't hide the smirk on her face and this is okay: I know I dont fit in.
I am the only other woman in the place and all the other customers, all of them, are in camouflage. It is lunch time in the sysco-Itallian joint with the daily special wipeboard out front near the Dollar Store and Bowling Alley in Easton, on the Eastern Shore. For a second I laugh at the irony, think of when I used to handle the whole room on my own for lunch shift waitressing in a sysco-pizza joint with daily specials on the chalk board, and my patented disgust look for people I didn't recognize when they first walked in. I'd make them wait while I took drinks to the regulars just to make sure the stranger knew everyone else comes in here all the time.
I cant sit still in this joint though. I barely notice all the tables of men. This dumb low-grade headache got me instead, the kind you get from holding your body real still to avoid feeling.
Fuck it I end up thinking and relax my posture and stop being self-conscious of the bright shades of pink and purpled ribbons threaded into my scarf and my dirty hair in a side pony and my hot pink vintagy shirt and knee-high boots. I lean back, relax all my muscles, close my eyes and breathe in and out real real slow.
I been thinking about life lately and how fucked up everything is. The basic simplicity of this fact, the purity of it. Lacking implication: the results are yours to do with what you will, but certainly there are things, some things, lots of things, little things, enormous things that are just fucked up for no other reason than that's just how they are. And what do we do with this?
I mean, unless we end it or the random axe chops down on our string, we keep breathing in out in out no matter what. So then what, after the no matter what. What next after that?
When I was a kid I was so, so sensitive. I used to have funerals for butterflies, cry when bugs got squashed. Cried when the big kids in the neighborhood made fun of the way the fat boy ran around the kickball diamond. Somewhere along the line I toughened up, maybe too much? Tom calls me Toughie like that's my name or something. I dont know about that. I doubt there is ever such a thing as our barrings getting balanced, or set completely straight. We just find the broken-edged beauty of things, the place where the light sears in and steams up that spiral wound of pain. The prisms that shine out of the cut where the glass went in, and so forth...
I called my girlfriend this morning because I got this sickening fucking text at 8 am that her dad died. She answered the phone and we both just cried.
I mean, sometimes what the fuck else do you do?
When I open my eyes in the diner the black-haired lady is standing there with my iced-tea and she nods at me and calls me hon. My heart tweaks, my eyes fill a teeny bit with tears, and she puts a push on the order for my manicoti.
What the fuck. I have money for greasy sysco food and also my super-powered high heeled boots. The death mama is dancing in the steam at the base of the mountains, on the heat melting the ice at the bottom of the trees, in the trashstink and dirty black snow pushed up against the curb. She is dancing and those are the bass bass bass steps and drums and rhythms banging, you just dance along even when you dont like or cant sing the song.
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