“Oh, it’s a fluffy novel,” I said to the man who’d gotten me to pull my face up. With a cup of sugar and cream, and a little coffee I had been waiting for my friend to slide into the booth with me. While I waited, I read. Mindlessly. Until I was interrupted.

His skin was as richly dark as the cocoa he kept with him, which he almost forgot.
“You’ll need this for tomorrow,” the waitress said with familiarity.
“Thank you.” And he turned to me. “Now this, this is my chocolate on one side and cinnamon on the other.”
A regular. A man with plenty of time and a keen sense of down-home, old-fashioned, save-your-soul food. I liked him already.

“I just read a great book called The Historian,” he said beneath the weight of his book bag. “It was on the bestseller list.” 

“Oh OK. I’ll have to check it out. So what do you do? Do you write or work while you’re here?” 

“Yeah I write. I learned when I was about eight or nine.” 

Huh. Retired, and losing it. But then he laughed.

“I’m kidding. No I just ride my bike and come here every morning to read. And I ride my bike. (He said it twice, which for some reason I need to note. It’s part of how he charmed me.) Sometimes I mow. What do you do?”

“Well I have three kids-” 

“You? You have three kids? I thought you were in high school.” 

Mr. Rudy, my new friend, I love you.    

*

That’s what I planned to write today. And though I love it, I need to get brutally honest. It is the best writing, isn’t it? The kind that’s actually relatable. Not to say that cute, retired men in hole-in-the-wall restaurants aren’t relatable. But it’s not what is really in me.

How do I say it? How do I start? These are the words that I penned in blue at the top of my journal this afternoon. “I’m speechless. I am without speech,” Elaine from Seinfeld would say. And it is where I rest right now.

Some would call it a fog, a black cloud, a sheet covering, depression. I think it’s more like walking around after you’ve had your eyes dilated. It’s like being in the bottom of an empty gravesite and looking up without a clue how to climb out. It’s blah.

I haven’t been able to shake it for more than 24 hours, and I don’t often come to this place, though I recognize the décor. I have been here before.

I don’t know how I came, what pushed me in, but it sucks. And if you’ve visited, you know.

I could eat. If I do I’ll go for carbs, and sweets. Lots of them. Chips (my weakness), chocolate (my other weakness), peanut butter with chocolate (wait a second…there’s a pattern here), pasta, or anything else that would fill the void between my fingers and not in my heart.

I could check out with movies. Seinfeld, always Seinfeld. In good times and bad it is eternally a good choice. Ever After, Twilight, anything Jack Black, a multitude of Nicholas Sparks, What About Bob, The Princess Bride. I would be distracted, it would work. For a little bit.

Undoubtedly, I would still come up empty.

So I stay in it. I accept that this is where I reside.
And I wait, because God never lets me suffer forever.