Devious Journal Entry

Apr 18, 20144 min read

Deviation Actions

Published: Apr 18, 2014

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_{I sat in an IHop before noon. The bustle and clatter and murmur of a large city coming in for breakfast was a relaxing backtrack to a long, difficult conversation. Not difficult as in uncomfortable, as there was great ease in the flow of words, simply that the subject matter was particularly grim. A woman with honey brown skin served coffee, a boy with a heart tattooed on his thumb gave condiments.

We talked easily over the hushed roar of a full restaurant.

It was the same conversation we had had before when I first arrived, and once a week back before my upcoming departure, a heavy, black fog of a problem that seemed to be constantly carrying itself over and through my companion's head. The words I said were the same in essence I had said the other times, only now more confident, more broad in assurance as if from a play I had done in the past. Improved philosophies flooded between us, a kind of silvery white, ageless flow of spoken thoughts tangling with the golden air of the restaurant, almost foreign in this bustling place that surely didn't meet much of this type of talk with its small families and happy, bright-faced younger crowd.

It had dawned on me, as it had before, the complicated nature of her predicament, though I had experienced a much more simplified, down-scale problem in essence. It was the kind of issue that one says, as the phrase goes, "I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy.", even if she had completely convinced herself that that was exactly what was going on. It was the kind of issue that, when having it occur to oneself, finds themselves utterly rethinking the way the world works and if life has a true point or if we are all scattered dandelion seeds on a quaking breeze. Things are turned upside down, inside out, to where they just barely resemble their original form; the future seems to dismantle itself before one's very eyes and all one is left with is the bleak sense of impending and ultimate doom.

A sip of coffee, five sugars and two creams in a whirlwind before calming into a soothing beige, and a troubled look framing the white mug. I try to say what I feel would help, at least myself in this situation, the assurance that there is time left to regrasp another form of happiness, find another prospect to hold onto and shape a future in the wet, doughy outline. But the fog is heavy, I know it is for there was a time when it possessed me as well. The emotions are like actual possession, an infestation of foreign, wicked thoughts that drive one to a terrible, dark, and sometimes lethal place. She was at that place, sitting in the passenger seat with the door parted and legs hung over the side.

I try to talk out a road map away from there: take a right at the thought of what you have, three miles from the hope of another love, you'll see the smiling face of a friend on the left before you get there. I have a sense it's all in vain at times, even as I speak I feel them not quite connecting, but I keep talking anyway in the hope that something will stick. I remember someone telling me that if you repeat something enough times, your mind will store it away; so I say what I've said like a skit in the soft glow of the stage lights, reaching out with feeling, adding emphasis where there wasn't before. The perfect line sticks with us, words we like how they are strung together. I try to do that so they will ring out when times are at their worst, when the fog is heaviest, darkest, and there is only the distant bell tower chiming out that time is still passing to heal the wounds of the past.}