[Day one]
Life goes on, they say. It doesn’t actually go on, but the world around you does. When you’re clinging to that moment in time before everything suddenly fell apart, the world moves at a staggering pace. You lose your grip and are flung to another time, another world. It’s not the one you want to be in but it moves at a pace that you can keep up with, so you settle down. You exchange the dream of a PhD for the monotonous life of a waiter in a small restaurant. It doesn’t matter that you don’t know the town that well, or that the only shallow bonds you have are to your co-workers, because none of it matters. All you want to do is hide and forget that moment, hope that it never comes to haunt you again. It’d be neat if one could say that the world works like that, but it doesn’t. You may have been flung to another world, but that moment is always chasing you. Sooner or later all the crap comes back.
“Excuse me, I ordered a cheeseburger without mustard.” The shrill, sniffy voice of an upset customer is worse than any crying baby in the world. Why? Because this person is supposed to be an adult, and she can’t even order food properly.
“No, you ordered a cheeseburger. You never said anything about the mustard.” My voice wasn’t in any way upset or rude, nor cold or distant, and yet she glared at me like she was trying to make my head explode. I could almost feel it, starting as a tension by my temples and then wandering to cloud my whole head.
“I know what I ordered.” People never knew what they ordered, since they never actually knew what they wanted. They’d order one thing, and then change their minds and make themselves believe that it was what they actually had ordered.
“So do I. I had to listen to you change your mind four times before you finally decided.” She looked like a pug. Not one of those cute little dogs with wrinkles, but the bottom end of a large sack of too soft skin. I could almost see the edges of the glass pane being constantly pressed against her face to make it hold that form. It looked surprised now, that mashed up face. I wasn’t supposed to talk back, it had gotten me in trouble before, but why was the customer always right? She wasn’t right, she was an idiot, and I should listen to her just so she could tell her equally moronic friends to come to the restaurant as well? No. Just no.
I was swept away by a hurricane of whirling blonde hair, and it spit me out in the kitchen; boss’s domain. When I turned back to look at that lovely hurricane it was already half way through the flippfloppedy swing doors and on the way back to the upside-down sack. It was always like that. Carrying me to a place and then spitting me out just to leave before I could say a word. It was refreshing, but always left one unsatisfied, craving just a little more of that clean crisp air.
“This is the third time this week that you’re being rude to a customer.” The boss’s voice was quieter now, compared to what it had been when I started working for him. His knife moved at a slower pace as well. What had been just a sheet of silver was now clearly nothing but an ordinary steel knife. The fits of anger and passion had been replaced by a mellow calm, a change which could be tasted in his food. From picante to bland in a day, and I doubted there was any turning back. His love for food had left him together with his wife.
“I wasn’t being rude. She ordered a cheeseburger and that was what she got.”
This would’ve sent him into a fit before, but now he just sighed and wiped his forehead with the towel always hanging over his shoulder. “It doesn’t matter what you think. The customer is always right. If this happens one more time you might as well walk out the door at once.”
I wanted to walk out now. Waltz right out there and never look back, but that wasn’t an option. My options had all been taken from me at that moment, and I knew that they weren’t coming back. No one else would hire someone who claimed to be illiterate and refused to take money in any form but its true one. I’d have to keep graveling before this aging man who had never been able to hold on to anything but his restaurant, and I’d have to do it convincingly. “Yes, boss. I’m very sorry. I’ve just been in a bad mood lately.”
I got to take the day off to ‘cheer up’, as he called it. I didn’t need to be cheered up. My bad mood was a constant that I had come to rely on, something that would never change no matter what happened, no matter how many squeaky customers complained about the mustard they had ordered, no matter how many times the blonde hurricane decided to spit me out in my bedroom just to leave before I had opened my eyes, my bad mood would always be constant. It was the only thing that wasn’t an exponential curve or a sine wave, and I appreciated that. Cheering up would result in my solid base disappearing, fluctuating, and I couldn’t have that, as it could be the final cent that tipped the scale and made me leave and go look for a higher purpose – any purpose. No, I could not let that happen.
Brain-dead TV was a good cure for any thoughts of changing my life, so I sat down on the worn leather of the couch and stared at the screen until even the smallest notion of that wish to change had left me.
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