The chair creaks as the metal scrapes against the wooden
floor as she takes her seat in the roadside diner. The air wreaks of coffee,
blueberry pie, nicotine, and loneliness. The walls are filled with pictures of
their life-long customers with celebrities who happened to cross paths with the
diner on their way to bigger and better towns. For a moment, she daydreamed
about how she may be destined for a more grandiose kind of life. She wondered
if a different scenery would make her finally find what she’s been looking for-
happiness.
The waitress smiled, and her spearmint gum and
cheap perfume permeated in her presence. She envied her for a fleeting moment.
How she wished she could smile, even if it were fake.
He
ordered two coffees, a slice of the blueberry pie, and two forks. She pours the
sugar into her coffee as if she were planning on making syrup. It makes him
chuckle.
“Theo,”
he extends his hand for her to shake, as if they were sitting down to a
business meeting.
“Avery,”
she gracefully accepts his hand into hers and he holds it with the kind of warmth
and kindness that makes her heart beat just a bit faster.
He
grabs a fork full of blueberry pie. He enjoys every bit of its bitter
sweetness.
“So,
tell me, what prompted your attempt at flight?” He says as he wipes his lips
with a paper napkin.
“You
tell me your secret and I’ll tell you mine.”
Before
responding, he sees her slightly hunched shoulders as if she had been
hauling sorrow around like a sack of potatoes. He notices her perfectly shaped
collar bone and the frame of her face go in complete harmony with the rest of
her consummately curved figure. “How can someone this beautiful, be so full of
sadness that they would want to end their life?” He pondered. He wished he
could see if her smile was as stunning as he imagined.
“I
realized today that I have stopped living. That I am literally trying to make
it to the next day, just living in the thought of tomorrow. Then it hit me. I’m
not living. I’m waiting. And the problem is that I don’t know what I’m waiting
for. I’m kind of scared of what might be. The monotony of life has a way of
blinding you to the outside world. You get tied up in work. You run out of
stories to write. Words become tenuous and I feel as though I am at a
standstill with my mind. The deadlines are inching ever so closer and I seem to
be getting further and further away from the finish line. Like I’m living in
reverse, when what I really want is to quit it all.” He sat there, pensive. His
hands were clinched around his coffee mug, breathing a bit heavier now that he
has told a complete stranger that he is basically a basket case, or more like a
ticking time bomb waiting for the explosion.
“There
are these magical moments in life, you hold on to them. You make them memories.
When you look back on life, it is supposed to be full of smiles so big that
it makes your face hurt, laughs that come straight from the gut, but my memories
are dark and desolate. Dank, dusty corners and raw unending loneliness,” she
pauses to see the expression on his face. She can’t remember the last time someone
listened to her with such intent. Like he was trying to peel her back like an
onion and get to the root of her melancholia. They hold eye contact as she
continues the expression of her sorrows, “I am unable to laugh or smile. I
can’t even fake it. No matter how hard I try to push through it and just be
content in my emptiness, I can’t imagine living out the rest of my days with
the weight of sadness.”
Theo
sat there, silent, trying to find the words to fix her broken soul.
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