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In theory, the day should be a good one. The weather’s nice --- almost nicer than can be believed, like something out of a storybook --- all blue skies and perfect, fluffy clouds and merry birdsong. The Honey Festival’s right around the corner, and yellow banners are already draped from every given surface in preparation for it. The crowd at Miss Retro’s has been steady but not overbearing, comprised mostly of the regulars whose orders the eponymous Miss Retro could fill in her sleep, busy enough to keep her from getting bored but not too hectic either. Her jukebox is playing, the sound as glorious as the day she bought it, a string of great music spilling forth. She should be in a good mood.
She’s not, though, and she hasn’t been all day.
It happens, sometimes. She’s never figured out the pattern behind it, and yet she can’t deny the fact that there are days where she’s just… off. Where she feels like she’s moving out of sync with the world around her, too slow and yet too fast. These are the days where sadness clings to her, draped around her shoulders with a weight she can’t shake, bone-deep no matter how suddenly it comes over her. These are the days where she feels like she’s mourning, grieving a life she never knew, a possibility that could never have been realised. She can’t remember having grieved anything as potently as she laments something she can’t even name, and yet it happens every year, with regularity enough that it’s marked on her calendar in tight red letters.
She can’t explain the feeling but nor can she deny the well-worn urge to write about it, to condense the unknown into pitch-dark ink and let it sink into parchment as thoroughly as it’s sunk into her soul. Songwriting has always helped in the past; it is, in fact, the only thing that has ever helped --- the only thing that lets her get close to understanding it --- the only thing that lets her see the negative space left behind by a missing puzzle piece she’s never seen. It never helps enough, though, and she feels just as empty after picking up her pen as she did before.
She keeps a notebook in front of her while she works, stares at it between familiar orders, tries to mark out something to explain the ache in her chest and the pit in her stomach. The only things she’s actually managed to mark out are her previous attempts, scratched out with a neat, decisive strike-through that simultaneously feels like too much and too little and as indefinably wrong as had the words themselves.
When the bell rings, she’s on a lull in her shift, trying to process and only managing to tap her pen against the counter in a nervous tick she doesn’t generally indulge. The diner has just gone quiet --- her jukebox still in the process of changing tracks at the whim of one of her lingering customers --- and the sound is loud in the hush, but it’s noteworthy for more reasons than one. Most of her regulars have already come and gone, orders placed and filled and digested, so she knows who’s walking through the door before she even looks up. The smile on her face is more genuine than anything else she’s managed today. Her pen stills between her fingers. “Hiya, Duke.”
“Heya, darlin’.” He’s smiling too, the peculiar melancholy that always clings to him stronger than usual and yet softened by that grin. Maybe it’s the sun streaming in behind him --- the warm, cheery light she’d heard her customers talking about but not really registered herself until right then --- or maybe it’s just the fact that he’s the customer she’ll never admit is her favourite, but her mood lifts a little as he walks in. Not enough, but some. “Don’t suppose you’ve got a coffee and a slice o’ pie back there for me?”
She’s placed a steaming mug of coffee at his usual bar stool before the sentence even ends, a slice of her famous pie following it soon after. (By rights, she should have sold out of it hours back, but she’d reserved a piece of it for reasons she wouldn’t let herself consider.) “Got some right here for ya, Duke.”
“Anyone ever told you you’re an angel?” He slides onto the stool with an easy grace, one born of weeks sitting there, chatting with her over the counter, and yet there’s a jerkiness to the way he picks up his coffee that mirrors how jagged she’s felt all day. She thinks of the song playing from the juke --- there’s an old man sitting next to me, making love to his tonic and gin --- and wonders at how she understands it now in a way she never quite had before. “Lovely as ever, Miss Holloway.”
“Well, thank you kindly.” She wonders if he’ll ever call her by her first name --- can’t remember if she’s ever told him what it is and yet finds herself pretty certain he knows it --- but she doesn’t know his, so she decides it’s fair play. “How’s the day treating you? I hear it’s a nice one.”
He shrugs. His smile is a mask she’s well-used to seeing, and yet it still twists something inside her as the facade strengthens. “S’ppose it’s not too bad.”
“Mighty convincing there, Duke. I almost believed you.”
His chuckle’s a mask too, sheepish and yet disingenuous and filled with something so deeply sad that she aches to fix something so broken she can’t see the cracks for the glue. “It’s… an anniversary of sorts. Not one I’m keen to remember.” He looks away, and she doesn’t think he’s looking at the menu he’s pretending to contemplate so much as he is looking through it, at the middle space lurking between the threads holding together the universe itself. “Sorry.”
“Nah, fair enough.” She smiles, pretends she can’t feel her own shattered edges shining through it, ignores the fact that she knows they’re there even if she can’t place why. “I get it.”
She’d hoped it’d be… not placating, but consoling. Commiserating. A misery shared, a misery halved. It doesn’t work, though, not judging from the wry remorse writ in his expression. “Yeah, I suppose you do, don’t you?”
It’s an odd statement, knowing in a way she can’t quite explain, like it’s not an abstract idea so much as it is a fact. It scares her a little sometimes, how well he knows her. Not just in the manner of facts and figures, though she knows he listens when she speaks and remembers what she says, but in the way of knowing the soul of her. No one else even comes close --- though few bother to try --- and it’s a staggering thing, to be known so completely.
She’s long-used to a stage; it’s the even ground she never quite expects.
The jukebox is still playing in the background, the customer who set it going sitting not far away, his head bowed over the now-cold coffee she served him an hour ago, and yet she tunes it out. There’s no one else in the place, no one left to serve, no one to worry about outside of the two of them. Instead, she focuses on Duke, on the way he’s as ineffably clouded as she is, on the way their particular shades of broken happen to match, each the reciprocal of the other. (They’re sharing a drink they call loneliness, but it’s better than drinking alone.)
She pours herself a coffee of her own, slips around the corner, settles on the bar stool next to his. Smiles, and tries to keep it genuine, to submerge the grief still pulsing in her chest over a part of her past she can’t explain. Focuses, instead, on the present, on a here and now she won’t ever let herself forget because it matters too much to her, on a conversation that almost matches the shape of that missing puzzle piece.
The sky is blue. The sun is shining. And, for a moment, the pain numbs.