macserp

Day 12. Standing in the Supermarket Queue Behind April and Destiny. You know, the public really lets me down every time. I've been trying lately, of course, to open myself up. I find myself staring at parents, mothers, fathers my age, old couples, little children, babies going by in strollers and bjorns, etc. I don't know what I'm looking for, but I figure if there's something I need, I'll recognize it. I get a lot of empty smiles in return and sometimes I lock horns with the little devils and there's a moment. That happened the other day at the Jons market, standing in the line behind10 month old twins. One of them, the one blithely referred to as April, was stuffing her fat cheeks full of her stubby hands, while clinging to the bosom of her mother or her aunt I couldn't tell the two women apart. The other one - and I'm using their real names here that I overheard - Destiny, could barely hold her head up. Something was clearly wrong. Her eyes were dull and nothing grabbed her attention. She wasn't nursing or sleeping, she just hung there, suspended on the shelf of the other woman's breasts, neither smiling or crying. I looked at her caretakers, whose eyes were also dull and limned with heavy eyeliner. Each of them was very overweight, dangerously so for such young women I would think and in neither case was it child rearing fat. I listened to them speak about the prepackaged, salt laden food substitutes they were buying. Then they talked about the soap opera that afternoon while they swayed in the line like lowing cattle. I wandered into the future with them: bad health, bad habits, bad TV, bad diet, bad grammar, kids with bad porn actress names and bad boyfriends and suddenly I found myself having to hold back a tear because they were so beautiful, so stupidly unaware and beautiful, that I almost couldn't help myself.