The Girl At The Diner

She was a study in restrained elegance.

Hers was an uneasy smile, the kind that surfaces only when it has to. A twitch of indiscernible tumult betrayed the placid calm of her demeanour.

She was, for lack of a better phrase, quietly stunning.

Black, wavy hair, ruffled only slightly by the gusts of activity and the general hubbub of her manic surroundings. A gentleness of movement, married to the unmistakable, if barely perceptible, shifts of uncertainty and doubt.

There was economy in her motion, though excess in its inertia – a sense that each neuron fired was one she would rather have not wasted. As though every gesture had meaning, though what that meaning was, was an exercise in futility.

Just who are you?

The diner was loud, almost uncomfortably so. Patrons yelled, babies screamed. It was no different from any other diner at any other time in any other point in history. People came and left. Customers alighted and then returned. Workers buzzed about, busy bees in this colony of cheap eats and cheaper smiles.

The diner itself was constant in its inconsistency. A continuous ebb and flow of human beings, each with their own story to tell, their own dreams to share.

Their own nightmares to endure.

What was your nightmare? What lit up your dreams?

And then there was her. Almost unmoving, a stoic oasis at the centre of a storm. The food, a term loosely used for what was present before her, was consumed absent-mindedly, as her eyes drifted from it to the phone lying on the table in front of her.

The delights of deep-fried poultry were lost upon this most inconceivably spell-binding of creatures, her attention focused upon what was, clearly, a war happening in her own mind. Her gaze darted, fitfully, from chicken breast to her mind’s eye, from leftover coleslaw to the detritus of her heart.

Each passing moment lent her air a slowly-building, and depressingly alarming, hue of desperation.

Let me fight this with you.

She shifted uneasily in her seat, more a product of the apparent disaster that was unfolding within her than the chair’s poor design. Her lips trembled slightly as she exhaled in frustration. Or was it despair?

Her face changed. Just for a second.

A flash of…anger? Bemusement? Grief? It was hard to tell. The noise didn’t make it any easier to figure out what was really going on. But the signs were not good.

The trembling was even more obvious now. Her colour had started to rise. For a brief moment, the world stood still as the noise died away. There was nothing in it but her.

Oh no.

Something had snapped.

A tear rolled down her cheek, freed from the bonds of captivity, aided in their escape by gravity. Tellingly, her sculpted expression remained as unforgiving as granite. She cast a steely glare down at the screen of her phone, a potent cocktail of rage and melancholy.

All at once, I knew who she was.

Tired, broken by the world and those that had loved her. Strong, but not that strong. Weakened but not weak. A fighter who wanted to put down her sword. An artist that couldn’t help but paint one more masterpiece, even if it killed her.

This, was her magnum opus – the subtle lie that she told the whole world. The lie that nothing would ever break her.

Don’t give up.

It all happened so quickly. The wiping of the tear’s trail, the cleared throat, the lightning fast regaining of her shaken composure. All was well, was it not? No one had seen anything. And so it hadn’t happened.

Except it had.

She decided to not bother with the rest of her food. The leftovers were packed into a plastic bag, and she quickly disposed of them. She got up and left, exiting my life as quickly as she had arrived.

I knew that I had come to love her.

I could only hope that someone out there would some day, love her as much as I do.