#uninterrupted

I am a very interesting person

I hear Celine’s heavy New York accent from across the floor. It’s been months since she’s stopped by.

She’s been unwell but she doesn’t say it like that. “I was resting.”

She says she needs to leave soon but we talk for maybe thirty minutes. She’s been looking for handkerchiefs but no one sells them anymore. “I always carry two. One for me, one for if I meet someone who’s been crying.”

“How often do you meet crying strangers?” I ask, and she just laughs.

She tells me that our generation should be writing more books; we’ve been through so much. She says it’s bad out there, everyone sleeps all day, all the time. She says I should go to an Austen Society meeting, see if I can snag a nice man.

“I don’t think I’ve ever met a man who loves Austen like I do,” I tell her.

“Western dance, then,” she offers. “You ever been dancing? Those cowboys, they’ll treat you right. If it rains they’ll just pick you up, put you right in the truck. I told him I was heavy, he said you don’t weigh nothing. He asked me how long it’s been since someone’s taken me out. It’s been a while. A very long while. He didn’t like that.”

She can’t dance very much with her walker, but she does what she can, and she has fun. She shows me, swaying to nothing but the ambient noise.

It’s getting late. She has an appointment with a man who takes her blood, makes concoctions to revitalize it. She asked him if there was anything she could have done to fix it, prevent this.

He told her, no, no. Blood is blood, it doesn’t matter what you do to it. That’s why he became a hematologist: blood is honest.