monday morning at Panera

She held my hand across the car, in between the seats, but the way she held it, all I could feel was how soft her skin was--like an innocent small child--and I knew all she was thinking about was to keep going and to keep listening to the radio. I didn't know how to meet her grandpa, yet we ended up sitting across the table with him, and I was choking down some coffee, even though I don't like to drink coffee with salty breakfast food (I was having eggs and toast) and wished I had broken down and gotten a coke instead. They were saying all of the usual things that didn't mean anything special, but formed warm air in our booth, and I knew she wasn't thinking about what it had felt like to hold my hand (she had done it accidentally), but that was all I could think about when her grandpa kept blinking so slowly. I worried that my skin was going to get as old as his was, in fewer years than his did, and I started to panic. I panicked that I would never find myself married, and would lose all the things about me that gave the walls color, and made my dogs keep living. I suddenly felt sure that I would walk back into my apartment, alone, and both of my dogs would be 100% dead. I panicked that my hair would take an awful shape, and I wouldn't remember how to open fashion magazines, and I worried that the wrong perfumes would start smelling really good to me, and that I would be an old woman who smelled bad, but had all of her organs strangely unabridged. I knew my friend was thinking only about her grandfather's safety, about how he was getting along with a stint (or is it a stent?) in his heart but all I could think was that I wish I had told Peter I would marry him, and where would I be now. I'd be at Promontory. I'd be miserable. I'd be cutting coupons, and wiping tables at Wendy's. But as we got back into her car she said, "Thank you Lisa. Thank you for doing this with me. He's so proud, but he can't be so steely around my girlfriends, and I'm glad you were with me." And I felt bad that I hadn't even been with her, the whole time. I'd been drifting around the city with ridiculous expectations of how my life was really going to turn out after everything. I'm not missing all the points on purpose. Sometimes you just open the cupboard and find that it is bare. But sometimes if you walk to the other room, and then back again, you will find a different sort of bareableness, that you really weren't expecting. And this will help you to keep waking up and eating the same breakfast, over and over.