I'm at Denny's again. It's 5:15 Thursday morning as I write this sentence. I'm once again wide awake. I still feel like writing - I even blew the cobwebs off my notebook and brought it along - but I still don't have a topic.
I suppose I'll just wing it.
It's much more crowded here now than it was yesterday morning. Not that crowded is at all a fair or accurate word to describe things here now.
Yesterday some hippie dude and I had the entire place to ourselves. Now, there are five of us in the smoking section, and another half-dozen or so in the main eating area. The same hippie dude is here again. Or maybe he's stillhere. I never saw him leave, and he's sitting in the same place he sat yesterday. He's got his laptop and his paperwork scattered all over his table. He's here for the long haul, I suspect.
Moving my gaze around the room clockwise, I next see two old guys, sitting at different tables but each possessed of the same blank stare.
And, directly in front of me at the next table, there's a girl. There's always a girl in my stories, it seems. This particular girl smiled at me when I came in, and I smiled back. Now she's reading on her laptop and I'm looking at the back of her head and trying to remember how pretty she is. Tall, thin, with short brown hair pulled into a ponytail of sorts. Definitely doable, I think, though of course I'll be doing no such thing.
---
Food was good as always. I didn't eat it all, though. Perhaps my appetite has gone the way of my sleepiness. Oh well.
While I ate what I ate and picked at what I didn't eat, one of the vacant-eyed old guys left and the other one got himself a female companion. His wife or girlfriend, I suspect. Good for him.
Also, two youngish guys arrived, and now they sit in the corner booth talking to each other quietly but not quietly enough to keep from disturbing the ambience of this place at this hour.
The hippie dude is still typing away, and the pretty girl is still reading away.
Me?
I'm scribbling away in my notebook, of course. What a silly question.
---
It's 6:00 now, and the sky is starting to lighten. Though I can't hear them, I'm sure that birds are out there tweeting and whistling. And, I imagine, alarm clocks are going off all over the place as normal people begin their days.
I'll be going home soon, though I don't know why. I guess to type this entry into my computer. Not to sleep, that's for sure. I'm having lunch with HatGirl in six hours, and I can't risk missing that. I've flaked on her far too often lately.
I don't know why I go home at all anymore except to take care of my cats.
I've found that, for the last several weeks, that damn place nearly suffocates me with its emptiness. So I leave, all the time. I go to wherever there are people. Not to engage in any conversations, but instead to leverage the pressure of societal expectations as a crutch, to keep myself from falling over, or as a tight wrap, to keep myself from falling apart.
These people who I don't know and don't really care to know, they're some of my best friends lately. I should put them on my Christmas card list, thought of course I have no such list.
---
Well, DoableGirl has packed up her stuff and gone off to wherever girls like her go at times like this.
I suppose that's as good a cue for me to leave as I'm going to get.
