Happy Place

After a few months of applying to numerous jobs, I have received one lonely response from a prospective employer for more information. I haven't gotten any requests for an interview and I am discouraged.

Work has been stressful and shitty. Line cooks call servers lazy which is insulting to half of us and apparently is a cue to the other half to show them exactly what a lazy server looks like. Restaurant guests consistently tip 8%. A table with a $56 check left me nothing last night. Makes me glad to get 8% and wild-eyed with desire to get the fuck out of that restaurant. See above...I am trying, with no results so far.

It is cold. Buses do not always come when they are supposed to come. They also run infrequently at night when I get off work. It gets dark early and I work second shift hours so when I wake up there are only a few hours of daylight left which is depressing. My hands and feet are constantly sore and chapped from work and the cold.

Half an hour before the restaurant closed last night, the shift reached the pinnacle of shittiness. I wanted to be in my pajamas with the covers over my head. I was standing in the kitchen waiting for the food for one of my tables, trying with partial success to remain calm.

I took deep, cleansing breaths. I stood straight, elongating my spine. Imagining my idea of paradise.

I had off today, which is rare for a Saturday. I walked my dog for about forty minutes this afternoon. It was about forty degrees and the sun was shining. I was content but longing for warmer weather and to walk my dog on clean rather than litter-strewn streets. Again I found that I was daydreaming about my idea of paradise.

Puerto Rico, spring of 2004. Laying on a net in the front of a catamaran. Blue ocean: sparkling, clean, perfect, surf spraying my legs. Sun. Fish swimming in schools. Pina Coladas. Snacking on kiwi and strawberries in between aquatic pursuits.

I was active duty Air Force, about half-way through my enlistment. I was engaged to be married that summer. I was 24 years old. I thought my future would be filled with sunshine and snorkeling. Michael Cunningham said it beautifully in The Hours:

“I remember one morning getting up at dawn. There was such a sense of possibility. You know, that feeling. And I...I remember thinking to myself: So this is the beginning of happiness, this is where it starts. And of course there will always be more...never occurred to me it wasn't the beginning. It was happiness. It was the moment, right then."

"It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk. The anticipation of dinner and a book. The dinner is by now forgotten; Lessing has been long overshadowed by other writers. What lives undimmed in Clarissa's mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and its perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.”