The Diner.

This was for a writing competition.

Sheets of rain splashed onto the windscreen as I tore down the viaduct. I didn’t really care where I was going, I was just racing across from expressway to expressway trying to get some control on what my mind was spinning at me. There was just something about this city, with its tall ominous buildings that just seemed to mock your existence. Thunder erupted and an eighteen-wheeler sped past in the other lane, momentarily blinding me with a deluge of water from its tyres. God, I could use a smoke. I haven’t had one for nine months but I promised a friend in a collar that I’d quit once and for all. I don’t actually like smoking, it makes your fingers smell and ruins your sense of taste. The only redeeming feature was the quick escape it provides from life and the romantic notion of watching the smoke drift up into the sky as it leaves your mouth. Maybe it’s a writers’ thing, maybe I just wanted to get away from my sordid life. I had driven aimlessly for four hours now, it was about two in the morning and I was hungry. So, I floored the accelerated and pulled the old mustang into the first exit. The tyres skidded on the slippery road and left sprays of dirty water in their wake. I drove a few more miles and finally spotted the familiar diner.

The diner had opened there when I was a kid, a long time ago back in the day. It was one those grease joints that opened at all hours, where the burgers had enough oil in them to start a war. My family lived around the block, so we used to step in regularly to clog our arteries. Now, the place looked pretty rundown and more oleaginous than ever. I wondered when was the last time any health inspector surveyed the place, then I realised I hadn’t been in this neighbourhood for nearly a decade. Too many memories, and as I stepped in, they all flooded back. Old man Johnson used to run the place, left it to his kids who sold it on condition the menu was retained. The place has traded hands several times since then, each time on the same condition that the menu is kept the same. Don’t know who runs it now.

A young waitress greeted me with all the enthusiasm of a sea slug and began to chant out the specials while throwing the menu at me. I ordered the oiliest cheeseburger on the menu and a coffee. Ms Hospitality ran off to inform the greasy eyed fry cook behind the counter. It was really quiet in the diner. Looking around, I realised I was the only customer here. Somewhere in the background, a jukebox was playing some of the latest hits and I began to wonder what in hell I was doing with my life. I was going through one of those periods where one suffers the full blunt of life’s vicissitudes. The sort one sits up into the night nursing a bottle of Jack comparing what one has inadequately achieved to the overachievers he calls friends, wallowing like a baby in self pity as he wonders amidst the crushing loneliness what he was going to do with the rest of his miserable life. You know the sort: in between jobs, or girlfriends or dogs. The kind of depression you just want to blame God for until you realise it’s probably your fault and then you wish He’d never created you. Outside, the tempest continued to howl.

My food had finally arrived. The coffee tasted gray, but the burger was decent. I was in a mood for something greasy anyway. I had just taken a second bite when she threw open the doors of the diner and nearly brought in half of the storm with her. She was a pretty thing, about my age with a sweet smile. She seemed to fill the place with colour as she walked in. The walls magically seemed to regain their original lustre from decades ago. The waitress, too, underwent some metamorphosis before my eyes and cheerfully greeted her. Perhaps, it was something that she wore in her soul. Perhaps, she may have just been a regular, since the waitress and her stopped exchanging pleasantries and started to exchange the gossip of their lives. After the waitress promised to bring her ‘the usual’, she came and sat down in the table next to mine. One can’t help being drawn to such people I guess, so I turned and said ‘hello’. She ‘hello’-ed me back with a sweet sweet smile and before long she was sharing my booth and we were chatting away like old friends.

Her name was Melissa, she worked in a hospital somewhere, just got off her shift. Turns out, we shared a lot in common. She grew up in this neighbourhood, on the other side of the huge dual carriageway. We had the same childhood parish, but my parents had lost their piety. I couldn’t believe that we’d never bumped into each other in the past. I told her I could have never forgotten a pretty face like hers and it was a pretty face. I teased her about her eye bags, which were like crescent moons holding up her eyes, she said she got them from her mum. She teased me about my scruffy writer’s stubble and attempts at keeping fashionable hair. We talked a bit of politics, and the weather and the arts. We talked about importance of chastity amidst the fall of a decadent promiscuous society. We talked about music. She told me about her bad day at work, and I was amazed at her determined cheerfulness. I told her about my lack of progress with my book and my attempt to escape this dreary city in a month. We lamented about it, and chatted some more. I suppose that is the human condition, to be lonely and tired in life, searching for, yearning for some companionship in the hope of affirming one’s own existence.

We talked for two hours and then she refused to let me make the two-hour drive home and offered me her couch instead. It was a just a block away and I could leave the car at the diner. I held her hand as we walked back down the cold, slippery streets toward her flat. The smell of wet grass wafted through the air.