From the simmer of her eyes, I can tell the waitress has been speaking to me for some time now.

“I’m sorry, what was that?”

Her jaw tightens on words she’ll never speak. I know that feeling well, and I wonder if my tendons bulge as hers on soliloquies my mind performs. “What’ll it be?”

“The usual.”

She nods and runs.

My eyes follow her blankly, but my mind follows a course through my veins. Twining around my lungs, nestled in the curve of my hip. Tracing tendriled focus to my heels.

They ache again. Ache to find some place, though my tongue stumbles on its name. Too many times I’ve felt the itch to run and followed my gut straight to where I never meant to be. Now I’ve resigned to walking up and down the staircase, each trip brilliant with expectation of something new. Somewhere in me I’m assured this notion is ridiculous, yet still feel the familiar constrictions, deep within my chest, of some knotted disappointment with an enormity I wasted all my thoughts to defy. I feel certain as long as my tongue still stumbles, never daring to breath on truth, the expectation will stay alive. One day I will reach the top of the stairs and find meaning.

But the laundry all is folded, pressed with stains I’ll never treat, left crisply unwashed. And the dishes sit neatly stacked, scrubbed clean of emptiness and food stamps. Pasta today. Or was it yesterday? Today is Tuesday or Thursday, one of those days smashed between the weekends. I’ve found once you stop naming them, they no longer hold meaning. Time slants on itself, crashing down the sun and moon. The only change is the thing burning in the sky.

I wander in these rooms, these halls. A starved dining room and a dying living room. The cruel ironies of this ------ labyrint. Looking for some certainty unfound, waiting for some indefinite. A feeling. A reflex. A difference. Some revelation I’ve misplaced as to why my feet remain restless.

Yes mostly, I stand still, teetering on my arches. Balanced between nothing and nowhere in rooms I forget I’ve entered. I rack my mind for purpose, and finding none, wander to another. Lately my heart feels as though it wandered into my ribs and is possessed by the same amnesia. My bones are lost in my skin.

And then my heels begin to ache, and I stumble down the pavement in a route I’ve memorized through cracks, ending the battered red carpet at this same little diner.

So here I sit and wait for the waitress to come back. She wears too much makeup for how little she smiles. And I’ve often found that funny, that she would paint herself in the most obvious mask, yet forsake the most convincing one. But she and I are not of the same marrow. As she leans over the counter to snap her gum, her canvas shoes rest lightly on the toes. She never shuffles with a sense of needing to run from nothing towards nowhere. Her heart must remember why it wandered into her chest.

I stare at prophecies written on the sugar packets and the pepper, the menus and the napkins. I scour for my prophet, carefully avoiding my hands. I hate to see them idol. I’d like to break them just to be sure they’ve no potential, no use. I hate to see them exist in such a perfect lattice of flesh and opportunity but lacking instruction.

An older couple sits together, screaming years’ worth of profanities in their silence. A little girl cries as her mother insists something neither comprehends. They have the same eyes. I find it strange to think no one else will have mine.

An hour bleeds away, or perhaps a few minutes. My knuckles brush at thoughts but all are insubstantial mist. When I grasp them in my fingertips, I cannot mold them into anything intelligible. The waitress won’t come back. Nothing comes back.

I stand and greet the door, tracing steps toward a place I’m unable to call home. A voice behind me says words I’m positive have definitions, though I don’t speak this language anymore. Something about seeing me tomorrow, enjoying my meal. Meaningless gibberish. I haven’t ordered anything here in ten years.

I’ll walk back and pray I fall, skin my knee on the pavement. At least if some part of me breaks I can be certain, once, I was whole.
But, of course, I don’t fall. I wander into a house that is probably mine. I’ll set the table for two tonight, make dinner for one. I’ll convince my heart to stick around, promise it's just becoming accustomed to the new surroundings, and pretend that thirty-five years is a normal duration for homesickness. Fold the laundry, scrub the dishes. Watching the light move across the floor beneath my dubious soles. And, for tonight, I’ll ignore in the ache in my heels.