She
glanced out the window toward the bay, her bread bowl steaming with a chowdery
smell. She came here every three days when living alone became something too
hard for her to bear. She toyed with her iPod for a few seconds before
selecting a Jonsi song to people watch to. The funny thing about people
watching to music was that there are so many rhythms for walking. No matter
what music she played, there was bound to be a vein of sightseers whose inner
rhythm synced with her iPod. Some days
all the portly businessmen seemed to be stepping along to the beats of Usher’s Yeah. Other days it was the expectant mothers who
appeared to be marching along to the Orinoco
Flow of Enya. Today it was the groups of young college students who were
exploring Fisherman’s Wharf, hoping to see the seals, scurrying to the beats of
Animal Arithmetic.
She did
not people watch simply for the amusement of imagining them dancing, it
satisfied something in her heart, or some other deeply seated integral organ. The
pangs of loneliness had begun in her early teenage years, when her small group
of elementary friends had, by no fault of their own, drifted apart. At that
point in her life there had always been a social event to be a part of, a way
to pretend that this loneliness was not there. When she realized in eleventh
grade that almost no one was walking to the same inner rhythm that she was, her
kind nature had glossed it over, but there were pockets of despair at this
concession that cropped up from time to time. Having reached her twenty-third
year, living on her own in the big city, pursuing some dream of either her
making or early childhood’s grooming, these pockets came with more fierce
rapidity. Surely there were other people that felt the same way about the same
sort of things! In such a large city, she could not be the only one, or at
least she hoped. The people watching was a band-aid to a gash, assuaging the
pain only in so much as it stopped her bleeding out.
The
chowder shop was only one of her preferred venues, it was often full of people
speaking other languages and let her sometimes imagine that she was in some
village near Hogwarts with the frequency of people dressed in odd costumes and foreign
demeanors that seemed so magical. Another haunt of hers was the coffee-shop she
loved, just on the edge of the Tenderloin. It made her feel that she was living
a tad more dangerously, even if the only danger was that one of the homeless
men that sometimes sat on the stoops as she walked in to the shop would be
slightly more drunk than usual and call out to her. As she sat there, she would
people watch, but due to there being less people walking, and thus less rhythms
to measure, she would play card games on her computer, the suit played
depending on the gender of the person walking in to the shop or by it.
Sometimes
she thought of things from her songs, like wishing the Beatles would “look at
all the lonely people” like they did in Eleanor Rigby and find her among them
in a special verse. Perhaps then others would take note, and she would not end
up “darning her socks in the night when there’s nobody there.” But what does
she care. Most of the British boys who passed her on the wharf or in the street
didn’t have the compassion of John, George, Paul, and Ringo. If they did, the
world would definitely be a kinder place.
Occasionally
it was Jakob Dylan’s crooning with the Wallflowers that God Don’t Make Lonely Girls that made her scoff. Not only was the
boy in love with a stripper--who may have been lonely, but surely had plenty of
company--he was not going to fix her loneliness; he’d be back with Josephine from the track before in no
time. But such thinking was just depressing. She’d sooner try to pretend she
was part of the book club that sat near her on a Tuesday at the coffee shop.
She was as well read as they were, probably more so. A Picture of Dorian Gray was something she could relate to, a
person who on the outside appeared together, but whose secret self was
something far distant from anything a passer-by might think.
