a beginning

Eliza knew something she shouldn’t know. She had seen something she should not have seen. It was apparent all over her face as she stepped off the train and her first few steps were unsure. Almost in a daze, she gazed to the left. To the right. Straight ahead to the diner. She clearly hadn’t thought through her plan. Had clearly not been aware of where she had sent herself on a headlong trajectory toward the edges of the world. Anywhere far, far away from what she should never have learned.

Passing a hand back through dark curls as wild in the wind as midnight whispers, her pale eyes were ghostly. She only knew she had to find somewhere to get inside because lightning in bright, blue ribbons, was crackling across a sky that was quickly turning black. It was either the covered, heated little glass box on the platform or the diner across the way. The box looked claustrophobic and lonely next to the warm glow of the lights in the diner, it’s big glass windows a good place to watch the storm in safety and reflect. Plan. Recover.

Eliza jumped at the sudden boom of thunder so close it made her teeth rattle. They were already rattling. Chattering with fear. She hunched her shoulders in on herself, yanked up the hood of her soft green hoodie, and hurried toward the diner. The Diner at the End of the World. So it might have been. All she knew was that there were eyes all over her from that big window she had thought was so much more friendly until she realized people sat behind it. Watching the only person to exit the train at that platform. That deserted platform. It didn’t matter though. She smelled the rain before it began and made it inside just as the sky split open and let loose a deluge heretofore unseen since Noah built his ark.

Funny, she thought, her lips quirking up to the side slightly. I wonder if other people think about such random connections to things the way I do.

Eliza slid onto a stool at the counter in the middle of the diner. It was easier than admitting she was sitting by herself, alone at one of the tables. Just now, being alone was the most lonely thing she could fathom. It wasn’t always that way. Usually she enjoyed her own company but with her head full of unwanted knowledge, she didn’t want to feel as alone as she was.

She glanced sideways at the only other patron at the bar. A young man with a glass of milk and an half-eaten omelette in front of him. He was glancing sideways at her already and caught her eye. She quickly looked away and heard him breathe a laugh and set down his fork with a faint clink against his plate. Everything sounded so crisp, so much more real in here, she realized. Even the furtively low conversations at tables around them were sharp, focused sounds against the backdrop of the growing, raging storm outside.

Eliza ordered coffee on autopilot, not really looking at whoever had asked for her order, instead watching the storm across the diner. The rain pelting the windows with the occasional burst of wind to intensify it. The lightning flashing bright as morning before fading into booms louder than Hades storming through the Underworld on a bad day. And there she was, Persephone somehow. Lost in a world that was not of her own making but she’d eaten the proverbial pomegranate seed and now she couldn’t unknow what she now knew.

The coffee appeared to have slid itself down the counter toward her, arriving in her peripheral just as the sugar also slipped into view beside it. The guy was sitting back down on his stool, eyebrows slightly raised as if to ask if she needed anything else.

“Oh. I don’t… I drink my coffee barefoot,” she said apologetically as though his having provided her with sugar had been some grand gesture he shouldn’t have wasted on her.

He breathed another laugh. “Barefoot?” he asked, reaching along the counter to withdraw the unwanted sugar.

“Seems less insensitive than calling it black. Not that… No.” Eliza felt flustered. She didn’t want anyone’s direct gaze on her right then. Yet his eyes, a similar green color to her own hoodie, were so kind, if slightly amused. She found herself smiling slightly without realizing she’d begun. She quickly lifted her cup for a sip and decided she’d found the best cup of coffee she’d ever had. “It sounds more interesting to say barefoot. It’s meant to begin a conversation.”

So why had she said it? It wasn’t like it was force of habit. She couldn’t even remember having said it out loud before in her life and yet there she was, shooting it out there to a stranger. One whose expressive eyes seemed to hold both a kind of familiarity and a depth of the unknown at the same time.

“I think, with the way your hair is competing for the award of Best Actress in a Comedy, you were going to end up with a conversation anyway,” he quipped and picked up his fork again for a bit more of the omelette.

Eliza looked up sharply, sputtering a little on her coffee and a lot on her laughter. “You’re one to talk! What’s with all of the bowties? I count four!”

He wiggled his eyebrows at her. “And those are only the ones you can see!”

Eliza had no response ready for that. Her mouth just stayed open, eyes slightly wide, for just a moment until she laughed and shook her head, eyes dropping once more to her coffee. It wouldn’t do either of them any good to let their guard down. They would be looking for her soon enough. And as soon as she’d had that thought, her phone tinkled delicately in her pocket. Reaching into her jeans pocket, she pulled out the phone and looked at it like it might have learned how to think on its own and was plotting her murder.

“That. Is a phone. You just have to hit the red button. To make it stop doing. That.”

Eliza felt the tug to laugh in spite of herself and she glanced over at him, stabbing the red button with her thumb and setting the phone on the countertop facedown. But her breath caught as she met his eyes completely for the first time. A rush of warmth filled her body, goosebumps raising so fast along her skin that her whole body shivered.

Like a whisper through some long forgotten hallway, dark and lined with faded memories, she heard her own voice. Aged, but clearly her own, reciting:

it's a quietness unlike rest
with you
very like dreaming
simply the wonder of eyes into a soul
matchless & beautiful
with you
the tender beating of a kindred heart
soothing
shallows slipping into the depths
i know you, traveler
you've invited me
so i've dried the tears from my eyes
with lifesticky fingers
and i've written it in verse form
to represent the void and
the gilded inverted cage
where i, the canary,
sing a song of sixpence --
a pocketful of time
and raw existence -- here
when now is all and all could be so empty
loneliness breaks in waves
across desert planes of laughter dust
where once all was lush with ardency
i choose to remember none of this
when you walk beside
as we internalize the wonderment of faded stars
across an open sky
and i,
allowing the tendrils of moon promises
to encircle the frozen statue wearing my face
and bury it in sweet slumber,
kiss your mind and dream
until tomorrow's moon rises
over we two, my lovely
my brother
my heart

The last words slipped into the strangest burst of adrenaline and calm that had Eliza fighting to understand if she wanted to get up from her seat and bolt out into the storm. Or stay. And curl up in some half-forgotten, not-yet-formed but very familiar and foreign comfort that she sensed in that moment. And clearly he had felt something or heard something as well for his eyes looked haunted and hopeful and a thousand other unreadable but perfectly understandable things. She knew in that instant that there was a reason she was here. At that exact, precise moment in time, she had been predestined to step into this world and experience this. How she knew was neither something she cared to understand even as a gaping hollow of insatiable curiosity woke inside of her.

He broke the silence first, swallowing slowly as though choosing his words carefully. “What. Was that?”

Eliza couldn’t seem to find her voice, the sound coming out in a dry croak that made her face turn red. She cleared her throat and whispered. “I don’t know but you felt that?”

He nodded. “I uh. I’m -”

“Jack. I know,” she said and she could tell my his reaction that she was right. How odd to be so sure of something she couldn’t possibly have known. Yet she was and even Jack didn’t look overly surprised. As if he had known that she would know. It all struck her as incredibly uncanny and she shivered again.

“Jack. And you’re Eliza.”

Eliza nodded and suddenly felt so completely exposed that she pulled her eyes away from Jack and began awkwardly trying to arrange the mane of curls atop her head. Her phone began insistently tinkling on the countertop but she ignored it, fear now edging what was, moments before, only some kind of calm excitement.