faces in the crowd of life (part 1)

This is the first segment of an idea that came to me one day.  I have met and seen some interesting people over the course of my life, especially in St. Augustine.  Some of them I do not really know (i.e. seen from afar) and others I have gotten to know.  This segment is about one of these said characters.  Be forewarned, I am using fiction to a great extent, because I don’t know all of these people too well.

Grace the Librarian

I see her almost every day.  She is sitting most of the time, either at the Library or on her porch.  She never smiles, because she’s given up on smiling.  She just sits.  There are times when I want to ask her about her past, after I ask to borrow some headphones, because I forgot to bring mine.  My hesitant nature always wisks me away from that notion and back to headphones.  Other times I see her sitting on her porch facing east, with a cigarette in one hand and screwdriver (2 parts vodka, 1 part orange juice) in the other.  I often face east, down a small road, to catch a glance at what she’s looking at.  Trees, houses, kids playing in yards, and a man in his late 40’s walking a small dog.  Nothing to see.  I wonder, what is going on behind those eyes of hers.  Is she thinking of long ago, when she was spurned by a man that she loved?  Is she re-visiting the early death of her only child in a car accident.  Maybe, she is hiding her joy, her love for someone who she promised she would wait for.  Grace finishes up her cigarette, dumps out the rest her drink in the flowers growing outside her rented house and walks back inside.  She barracades herself in, to keep things out, only to keep her own memories at bay, in her pandora’s box of her soul.

 -Luke