#oneaday Day 667: Wasteland Diaries, Part 15

I sit on the uncomfortable plastic chair they hastily shunted me in the direction of as soon as it started happening. I can’t see what’s going on in the room, but the old guy with the kindly face whom I see most times when I’m here is still in there doing something. I’d stand and look through the window in the door, but there’s no real point. I wouldn’t be able to see anything, anyway, and they’d probably just push me away again, saying I was getting in the way.

My heart is thumping and my hands are shaking. It’s the closest I’ve ever got to reaching him. I could tell that all those things I said, he heard. He didn’t respond or say anything — he couldn’t — but he heard. That I’m sure of. Otherwise why would that have happened?

I’m not an expert or anything on these things. All the others are, though. I just get under their feet when they’re trying to work. They put up with me but I’m sure they resent me under their cheery, understanding exterior. They don’t know how it came to this, of course, but I imagine they’d treat me differently if they knew.

The old guy is coming out. He’s got a grim look on his face. He sits down next to me and forces a smile, but I can tell that there’s no sincerity behind it.

“Evie,” he says, his voice cracking a little. He clears his throat. “Evie.”

“Yes?” I say quietly, almost a whisper.

“I understand your reasons for wanting to come here, but–”

He doesn’t. He really doesn’t. They all have this big romantic idea of what I’m doing here when in fact all I want to do is atone for my sin, turn back the clock, make everything all right again. But I can’t.

“Hey,” he breaks off, seeing my eyes filling with tears. “Look. You’re tired. Why don’t you come with me and get a coffee and we can talk, hm?”

I sniff but don’t trust myself to speak right now. I just nod. He stands and offers me his hand, helping me up. I don’t need the help but the gesture is a nice one, like old-fashioned chivalry, dead to most people nowadays. He leads me through a maze of corridors to the cafeteria, sits me down at a secluded table in the corner of the room and heads over to get the coffees. He returns a few moments later with two large mugs and a Belgian bun.

“You looked like you could do with eating something nice,” he says. “Go on. On me.”

I take a bite. After months of bland cup noodles and dry pasta, it’s delicious — so sweet and moist. I devour it in a matter of seconds. He looks at me, an eyebrow raised.

“Someone was hungry,” he says. I laugh weakly and he smiles.

“You wanted to say something,” I say eventually after a silence slightly too long to be comfortable. “You were going to say I should stop coming, weren’t you?”

“Well, not in so many words,” he said. “In fact, no, not at all. Like I say, I know why you keep coming here — you think you can reach him. And it’s quite possible that you can — today’s episode occurred during your visit, after all.”

“It could be a coincidence,” I say, my faithful pessimism gene kicking in.

“It could be,” he says. “But I think you could be on to something. However–”

Here it comes.

“However,” he says again, “I’m worried about you. Since we’ve started seeing you, you’ve lost a lot of weight, you look very pale, your eyes are dark and you look exhausted. You’re here most days. You need to take some time for yourself, relax, get your mind together. The way things have been going, a couple of days off from all this will do you good, and you can come back and try again afterwards.”

He has a point, I suppose. I do feel tired. I wake up every morning feeling like I haven’t slept, though I know I have because the time has passed in a heartbeat. Every day the same — wake up, get up, come here, go home, cry, sleep. My life. My parents would be so proud, particularly due to the fact that my not working is burning through my inheritance money at a rate of knots.

I feel a little sad as I picture the face my mother always gave me when I’d been naughty. Never angry, just disappointed — but it hurt to see that face. I hate disappointing her, and I hate that wherever she is right now, I must be disappointing her terribly.

I take a sip of my coffee and look at the old man.

“Perhaps you’re right,” I say. “I need a rest. To take a break. Life… hasn’t exactly been easy since ‘it’ happened.”

He nods.

“I understand,” he says. “When this sort of thing happens — we see it a lot, too much for my liking — it can feel like the end of the world, I know. But I’ve seen your type before. You’re a fighter, you want to keep going, pushing onward. And you can do it. But you shouldn’t sacrifice yourself in the process. What good’s rebuilding a world if you can’t enjoy it yourself?”

He’s right. I should take some time, get myself together and figure out how I’m going to cope. Rationally — pessimistically? — speaking, I might never reach him, so I’ll need to figure out what I’m going to do if that does happen.

But on the other hand, I might actually reach him one day, and soon. And I’ll need to be ready for that, because it might not be the joyful reunion that the one tiny little optimistic piece of my mind that still survives is hoping for.