You're Young Until You're Not.

Today, I am the only laptop in Caribou. The girl at the register, who usually frowns, smiled at me. She is wearing a black turtleneck sweater, and her curly, red hair is up. I think she may be smiling because she messed up my drink the first time. She didn’t really mess it up, though. I did. Today, I ordered decaf, because the doctor said caffeine would cause the stitches in my mouth to bleed. So, after a week and a half of ordering the same drink, I changed my order, and she still made it correctly.

There is an old woman sipping her black coffee and eating a large muffin (possibly the muffin I had my eyes on earlier this coffee break.). She is wearing a Christmas-red sweater with black-and-white checkered pants and tennis shoes. It all clashes in that way that makes you love her like your own grandma. My mom’s mother wears leopard-print stretch pants and baggy sweatshirts with wolves on them. This woman is alone, though, unlike my grandma. She is reading the paper. She is not my grandma, and so I can not comfort her.

The two business people in front of me are just getting back from their vacation, and I envy them. I miss being stressed about things that half-matter (instead of those things that matter too much). He is in a brown suit with a light blue, woven shirt, and he does not look as professional as he could. The woman is blonde, and looks tired. Her glasses are only a little crooked, and her face is flushed red (maybe from the cold). I think she is a nurse (because I cannot recall where the dark blue scrubs are worn, and this may be sexist). They are analyzing a survey, where several people strongly disagree with the accusative statements made about the clinic.

I am not so bored yet today, but it is not even 10:00 yet.

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I am spinning the strands of silver that grow and drift from her head. My mother combs her hair each day with that red pick in her tired hands, finding a few more strands of silver-grey.

I have transformed my inner-dialogue from an exhausted fantasy into a spiraling faux-reality where everyone is facing what I am facing, swollen-faced. She is growing her mother’s silver hair, and he is fighting politics with his eyes closed. They live to name what they are searching for.

I, however, am wearing on their thin nerves. They are consuming solid food and sleeping until eleven. Her mother’s sliver is that of an ancient, wise woman, not a wolf. His father has long since abandoned the structure that I have sought.

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Yesterday, I cleaned out my entire room, and began throwing away those things that I only pretended I wanted in the first place. There were some things that I still cannot part with.

I threw away notebooks and notebooks that were only one-half or two-thirds full, they were filled with information about the history of the Catholic Church, the Spanish Inquisition, and world hunger. I threw them away, because I could not even bother to thumb through them. I disposed of most of the graduation cards I received. It was a terrible thought, but, for a second I wished that everyone had saved their breath and given me the 1.99 they wasted on that card that I read once and emptied. I deleted the baseball caps and Boy Scout books and plastic things that sort your money and a book on children’s mass and broken pencils and magazine clippings and Dallas Cowboys’ magnets and hats. I took my Dallas locker (finally emptied) down to the entry way, because it was an unnecessary fixture that collected dust like my old magazines, which I could not resolve to throw away.

The man behind me is condemning the book he is reading, because he is bored.

He has only read eight pages.

I am not even eight pages long.