She sat there on the porch of her favorite café in midtown. The café’s exterior looked like a small house. It was a dark red with generic, white lettering above the entrance spelling out, “Café”. The inside was a room and a half with a bar for coffee and homemade pastries, seating area, and a partitioned corner/room for smokers. The porch was made of wood, now grey from age, and a step or two above the sidewalk. The porch looked out onto the wide two-lane road and run down strip, which mostly consisted of a white drug store, a liquor store, a couple of businesses, and a hole-in-the-wall restaurant. Angela was birched up on the porch at a small table with one foot in the seat across from her. Her short jet-black hair was tangled like she made a b-line from her bed to the café a couple of hours earlier, which is probably not too far off. She always wore simple clothes, “since I was a kid,” she insisted. Whether or not she had didn’t really matter beyond the image she wanted to be placed upon her. The fact is that she was living up to her word with her black short-sleeved shirt that followed her collarbone and ended just below the belt line of her green cargo pants. The rest of her appearance was complimented with her black sandals, a couple of bracelets, and a thin, black necklace that contrasted beautifully with her fair skin. She always smelled like cigarette smoke but had never smoked one in her life.
All of this is secondary to her face though. Her face told her story. Her smile was of a girl who had to grow up too fast. It was not new; it was clear that it had grown to become that way over time. Yet her cheeks were still innocent, like a man’s lips had never touched them nor a man’s hand ever slap them. But it was her eyes - surrounded by dark, but modest makeup – they were the last things keeping her honest. You can hide behind your tongue, let it make up stories and tell the sweetest lies. You can hide behind your appearance by letting stereotypes speak for themselves. You can even surround your eyes with smokescreens, as Angela above does. But you cannot pull a veil over your eyes for too long before your soul starts to whisper through them. You can suppress it for a while but in the end your eyes will always keep you honest. She was especially vulnerable due to the street noise and being alone at her own table; her eyes were screaming louder than the call of a crow.
Angela was playing around with a greyhound ticket in her hand. “Tomorrow, all my hope is in tomorrow,” she thought as her eyes stayed fixed on her ticket like she was in a starring contest with the greyhound logo. It was her way out and thus her way in. She spoke of this moment for at least two years now. Whenever someone would ask her where she wanted to go, she just replied “Anywhere but here.” All she knew was that where she was, her circumstances where she was have left her empty, unsure, lost, and, worst of all, stagnate. All Angela knew was that her life as is and as it has become has given her nothing to hold on to. The answers, the purpose and meaning of her life was not were she was at; it was where she most go. For her to see inside herself – to see her very soul face-to-face – she had to go out.
It was dusk and the orange glow made everything all the more surreal to her. It was a moment not easily forgotten, like she was about to storm the beaches of Normandy or trust a lover for the first time. These moments, as rare as they are in our lives, carry so much weight and it takes years to shed off the pounds. She had an early morning the next day but she had a hard time getting up knowing it was admitting one more step in the process. But she was determined. She was leaving tomorrow from the only town she ever knew and was not coming back until she truly found out who she was. As her foot left the chair across from her she heard a voice that she had not heard in a couple of years. It was a voice that you didn’t care to remember or forget, and right when she climbed into her memory deep enough to remember who’s voice it is, it was too late to make a move on either avoiding him or embracing him. “Angela?”
