A Woman Sitting Alone for Lunch

(also written a few months ago)

She eats alone, a fork stabbed into chicken.  She eats alone, there in her booth dreaming of a life that didn’t so closely resemble hell.  Maybe it wasn’t so bad so long ago, but now she sits here, with her fake helping of hospitality and dreams that it wasn’t so bad right now.  Someone should walk in she hoped, someone familiar, someone kind that knew of her, and what she needed.  But instead she sits alone, eating alone, thinking alone, wondering alone inside, what it was that brought her here.

                She brings the chicken to her lips, and in her mouth she chews, her teeth tear at white flesh, and she chews, her teeth gnashing it, and grinding into chunks, the human garbage disposal at work, and then down the drain.  While she eats she remembers things, and she wonders if the young man across the room from her has remembered the same things.  And she chews some more, and imagines that life hasn’t hit him too hard yet.  Its only a matter of time though, in her mind she tells him this, she tells this stranger, its only a matter of time before you’ve felt as alone as I have. 

                In her plate of lies, in her plate of that fake hospitality she sees the faces that brought her here.  She sees the parents that brought her into this world, and brought into all of this mess, if it wasn’t for them making her exist, if it wasn’t for their bodies connecting, if she hadn’t become some fertilized mess in her mothers womb, none of this would have happened.  Some small cataclysmic event had brought her to this place, sitting in a booth, alone, with the only company a type of reflection of herself across the room.  It wasn’t all so bad though was it?

                Surely somewhere amongst the pretend homestyle cooking she could feel warmth, or she could just let her mind rest to taste the carrots, and the green beans.  To let her taste buds encase her mind, and not her thoughts of things that just go wrong.  She spoke to herself in riddles, never spelling out the true causes of her misery, right now she just wanted to imagine her problems as snake like silouhettes on the backdrop of life.  She needed to give them shapeless slithering forms just to make sure she could go on, when she made them real again, then they were alive, and right now she just wanted to enjoy her meal.  Plus who knows who was eavesdropping.

                Was God listening to her, if he was there.  Was he wondering why his child was wounded so, why his daughter was weeping behind her eyes as she ate the mashed potatoes.  If he was, she didn’t want to repeat it all again in the same words, with the same faces laughing at hers, she didn’t want to be a nuisance to the omnipotent creation of everything.  And if he was listening did he care?  Surely if he had cared, things wouldn’t have turned out this way.  But she couldn’t think like that she couldn’t let her thoughts get drawn into philosophical debates, she didn’t need to make her worries and troubles span an entire cosmos, she needed them to encase her simple soul, if she even had one anymore.

                And as she ate more, and she finished what was left, she dreamed that one day that young man would remember while he sat down to.  Maybe he would sit and eat his fake hospitality and maybe he would believe that life was horrid, and this was it.  This is what they had when nothing was left of us.  She didn’t hope this on him, she truly didn’t, she hoped he would be surrounded by loved ones, laughing and not even paying attention to the faces in the plate, but only seeing the reflection of joy in someones eyes.  As the last of the homestyle cooking entered into her stomach, she stood up and placed the plate in the garbage.  She picked up her purse, and she smiled at the young man.  Of course he wouldn’t know what was behind that smile, but she did, and for a moment she saw something beautiful around the corner, if not for herself, then for someone else.