Waiting.

(I wrote the beginning of this while sitting in a coffee shop about a year ago. My friend, Tyler, and I picked an older woman sitting alone and decided to write a story about who she might be. I finally just found a way to finish it.)

The date was September 26^th but that was the only thing that had changed. Every day, nothing changed but the numbers. The days, weeks, months and years added up to a number far too large to comprehend but she was not interested in the math.

The days moved on but she stayed still. Her posture, hairstyle, and even her coffee order stayed the same. As the days raced on like an athlete determined to be the first to feel the finish line absorb the weight of their final triumphant step, her feet stayed still. Crossed at the ankles, under the same table in the same coffee shop. She waited.

He had left her in that coffee shop, and now she waited for him to come back for her. She was determined that it would be in that exact place that he would find her again. His path had taken him away from her, but hers had come to a halt the moment he walked out the door.

She had still been a young woman on that day. She had dressed in green because it was his favorite color on her. She remember flirting with the mirror as she applied her light makeup, he always said she looked much prettier without a layer of stuff on her face. She had been excited to go to “their place” and loved it almost as much as she loved the idea that there was a place that they called theirs. Looking in the mirror, she had wondered if they would go for a walk or maybe just sit and talk for hours. She had looked forward to the day because she knew that it would be full of him.

She had been making sure to arrive at their coffee shop early ever since he casually remarked how he loved entering to the sight of her sitting there. How he loved seeing her sitting at the dimly lit table in the corner, holding onto and taking comfort from her warm caffeinated beverage until he could take its place. He loved to see her sitting and waiting, loved knowing that it was he she was waiting for.

The day had held so much promise as it stretched itself lazily before her. It had been a gift waiting to be opened, a treasure waiting to be found. She had enjoyed taking time to revel in the anticipation of their time together.

She watched him walk in and could not stop her face from stretching into a grin to greet his. Her girlhood dreams danced in her eyes like fire flues caught in a jar on a warm summer night. It was another thing that he had told her he always loved about her. She was incapable of keeping her emotions from dancing around her face, especially the happy ones.

His eyes had seemed a shade darker than usual, but it was hard to be sure because they refused to meet hers. Now, she realized that this had been a sign but it was one that she had chosen to ignore at the time. When he finally pushed out the words that he was leaving, they had been directed to the table rather than at her. As he rambled on, she thought it sounded as if a deep fog had drifted in to push against his words as they fought to reach her ears.

He looked at her briefly before pushing away from the table and retracing his steps to the door. She called after him that she would wait. That there would never be another for her, that when he returned home it would be to his favorite image of her. She promised that her top would be green and that her eyes would light up with love for him. He had started to leave before she had finished, but she knew that he had heard her. She had watched his back and shoulders absorb the weight of her words.

The street around the shop had changed over the years. The park that they used to walk in had become a parking lot and the bookstore was now a bank of America. The young faces of the people behind the counter had not aged; they simply morphed into new faces. But they did not interest her; there was only one face that she wanted to see. She often wondered how time might have inflicted itself on him. She pictured him standing tall as always, but with streaks of white in his hair. Would he have wrinkles to echo hers? Would time have worked his voice to a lower tone, would it rumble a bit when he spoke?

She wondered when he would come back, but never if. She debated whether it would take a moment for him to scan the faces around him before landing on hers with recognition. Sometimes she pictured the long moment of watching his face fall while he worried that she was not there only to see him light up from the inside with joy. Other times, she imagined that he would be as sure as she was, that he would simply know that she would be at their table, and would walk in with the same confidence as always.

She would have nothing exciting to tell him, he paused her life when he left her. The world had shifted around her, and she had stayed completely still at the center of its rotation. She knew that he would fill her in on the details of his life. She could not wait to hear what he had done to make his journey back to her. She could not wait to meet the man that he had grown into. She pictured a more distinguished version of the boy she had known and hoped that he had not grown up entirely. She wondered what she would say to bring out his soft chuckle for the first time, and a soft smile flitted on her lips. It was as if she was recalling a memory rather than creating a moment that had yet to occur. She sat still every day, but her mind jumped form the past to the future, leaping decades. Never doubting, just waiting.

One day, she did not enter through the front doors of the coffee shop. The young woman behind the counter, Carrie, had been about to prepare her coffee and was shocked by the silence. She had been expecting the bells of the door to chime, but when the door opened twenty minuets later it was for a young woman and her child. The old woman never came in. Just before her shift ended, Carrie learned that the old woman had died in her sleep. It was supposed to be the most peaceful way to go, but Carrie knew that there was never any peace for someone who is always waiting and wanting. Carrie hoped that she had passed while having the dream in which her lover had never left and their children and grandchildren surrounded them in the home they had made together.

The next day an old man entered the coffee shop. Carrie watched his eyes move slowly over every face inside. When they landed on the empty table, they filled with an endless amount of emotion that seemed to age him another decade. With a deep breath, he walked over to the table and decided that he would simply wait for his lover to come in. She had promised that she would be there, after all.

The day after that, Carrie proposed to her boyfriend. They were in love and she knew that he was waiting for the perfect moment to ask her, but she had had enough of waiting, She did not want to wait; she wanted to live.