Thursday, October 15
Manchester, New Hampshire
Deep, deep in the morning, sirens.
I peer out the window of my coffee shop, waiting to see the flashing lights, the blur of brilliant, pulsing red, the rush of an ambulance blistering toward the horrors of others. I see nothing, and the sound fades, as all eventually do. Perhaps it was never there at all.
“Miss?”
I snap my attention back to the man at the counter. Older man, salt-and-pepper beard, deep-green eyes, the color of jade. Charcoal suit, no tie.
“I’m sorry. What would you like?”
“Cappuccino. Small. To drink here, please.”
His voice is deep. Enchanting.
“Of course.”
When he hands me the crisp five-dollar bill, I catch his stare, and his gaze is locked on me. There’s an endless longing to it, as if I’m the ghost of someone he once loved. This has happened before.
“Can I get a name?” I ask, holding eye contact for only a moment.
He thinks on this for a moment, as if I’ve asked a deeply personal question.
“John.”
I write this on a sticker and place it on the lip of a ceramic cup.
When I give him his change, he looks only at my hands. John takes his money and leaves my space as quickly as he entered it.
Sometimes I meet a person and my paranoia insists they already know me. Know everything. Where I live. How many scars I have. My real last name. It’s a game my mind likes to play when it thinks I’m getting complacent, or cured. Happy, even. I meet people every day at the Stone Rose, the coffee shop I own. Customers rarely give me this feeling.
But John does. I dismiss it, knowing my past has chiseled and shaped my mind into something that favors fear over sense. Paranoia over logic. I take a deep breath, hold it to the count of four, then release. Repeat.
Sometimes this helps.