20% of $86 is not $3.16.

If you ever wanted an example that time is just an illusion, try grinding coffee beans during the post-church rush on a Sunday. Those few seconds of monotonous grinding can feel like a lifetime in Heaven if you do it right.

Someone once asked me what the cheapest form of therapy was and I told them it’s the grinding of coffee beans. It’s simple, undemanding, and if you do it long enough, you sort of lose track of where you are. The rhythmic churning of the grinder combined with the general clammer of the restaurant turns into one solid sound that no longer has the distractions of its separate parts.

It is in that same bean grinding that I realize time really has no constraints… it is infinite. Seconds feel like minutes if your mind allows it to be so and even when the diner is running at 100 miles per hour, I fit in a quick mental nap when I grind those beans. In fact, if it’s really quiet, I might close my eyes and rest my head in my hands. If I’m lucky enough, I’ll see the patterns.

Oh, you don’t know about the patterns? The first time they appeared, I saw God… or at least I thought I did. It’s still very hazy and probably always will be. I was seven at the time and I tended to finish things a lot faster than I do today. I was also very diligent back then, a far cry from how I am now. Anyway, I digress… as I said before, I finished things quicker in those days, and more often than not, my reward was to sit quietly until the rest of the class finished up. I wasn’t big on naps then (also a far cry from how I am today), so it often felt like a chore. 

Reading always made the hours fly by, so I would normally bring a spare book (usually Dahl), but that one particular day, I knew I left it behind. I knew I left it behind because I remembered where I put it. It’s as simple as that. Having no book and no one to talk to (since the exam was still going on), I placed my head against the desk and used my arms as makeshift pillows. I wasn’t tired, but I decided to close my eyes since the sun’s glare was a little too much for me that day. 

Did you know the sun is going to explode? That’s what Ms. Looney used to say. She was my homeroom teacher. She’d say that one day the sun, like all stars, will explode. At that age, the thought always made me cringe. How would the plants grow? And going to the beach would be all but pointless. 

Yes, to seven-year-old me, it would be a crestfallen day when the sun exploded, as I would miss the plants, and the trees, and the lovely beach trips during the summer. I was also going to be awfully bored, just like I was that day, with my eyes pressed against my arms, waiting for time to go by. Also, what would I do at night? I was terrified of the dark and I had wet bedsheets to prove it.

And just like that, they appeared… the patterns. They were dull and blurry at first, but over time they came in as clear as crystal. It didn’t take me long to realize that the harder I pressed my eyes on my arms, the more the patterns would intensify. And they looked familiar, though I couldn’t quite pinpoint from where.

Oh, yes. They looked like the fractals I had seen in my older brother’s math book. What were they doing in my classroom? Was this all in my head? Was I crazy?

Am I still crazy?

And just like that, they were gone. With a gentle tap on my right shoulder, I awoke, a bit startled and rather confused. It was my teacher; apparently, everyone had finished the exam ten minutes ago and I was still in a world of my own.

One day, when I was a lot older, I read online that what I saw were phosphenes, just a manipulation of the light from inside your eye’s neighboring cells, no different than what makes a firefly glow. A pretty common thing.

That was the last day I saw God, but I still talk to her from time to time.

“Claire! Two coffees… one black and one with two sugars and cream, table seven!”

I snapped out of it. How long was I out for? It didn’t even feel like I was in the diner anymore. 

“Attending the church of java again I see Claire?” Dotty said with a smile.

“Just a couple more seconds, Dotty! Then I can bring this straight to table three,” I said as the whirl of the bean grinding sent me to Shangri-La.

“Seven.”

“Huh?”

“Table seven, not three,” Dotty said with a grin. She knew I could be a space case when I approached bean nirvana.

“Oh, sorry about that!” I said feeling a little silly about what had just happened. I knew Dotty wasn’t mad, but that still didn’t take away from the work that needed to be done.

Dotty has been at the diner since, well, since I can remember the diner being open. She served my brother and me when we were kids and I’m pretty sure she’s going to be around when I have children of my own. With all the changes going on lately, it was nice having some consistency in Dotty. Most of my friends moved out of town when college started up, but I still wasn’t sure what the right steps for me were. Truthfully, I’m not sure if I would ever know. Does anyone really know what they wanna do with their life?

“No rush, Claire, it’s not like any of them are gonna tip us well anyway,” Angela said right on cue, the devil on my shoulder, to counterbalance Dotty’s eternal optimism.

We all chuckled. The post-church crowd was notorious for their generosity to the church, but that’s where it stopped. For the most part, they were OK, but occasionally you would have to deal with a little self-righteousness. Dotty and I brushed it off for the most part, but it still got under Angela’s skin.

“I mean, who thinks a bible verse on a receipt is an adequate tip? 2 Corinthians 9:6–8, they get the irony, right?” scoffed Angela.

We all chuckled, not necessarily out of genuine jest, but you had to laugh. We knew all these bible verses well, a byproduct of growing up in a strong Christian town, not that anything was wrong with that, but there was also nothing wrong with tipping your waiters and waitresses as well. Everyone who worked at the diner had a different tale to tell, but that’s how we bonded… shared laughter. That was how you got through things. It definitely was better than the alternative, shared sorrow.

Angela was a handful of years older than me. She attended State for a couple of semesters but dropped out after she got knocked up by her boyfriend, Tommy. When he split town, she couldn’t manage school and taking care of the baby, so she moved back in with her parents. In addition to taking night classes at the community college, she scrimped and saved every penny she earned in hopes of saving up for a place of her own one day.

As much as I enjoyed Angela’s company, I think we both secretly looked forward to the day that we didn’t see each other because that would mean that one of us moved on to better and brighter things. We excluded Dotty from this unspoken pact because she had made it apparent a long time ago that this was her home, for better or worse. 

We were by far the three most tenured waitresses with forty-eight years of experience between us (to be fair, Dotty was the anchor of the team). While I was always delighted to see another staff member go off to chase their dreams, I couldn’t help but think that I was waiting for a train that would never arrive. Either way, I’d worry about it another day. As the timer ended, the next grinding session came to an abrupt halt and it was time to start brewing coffee again.

When I first started working here, it made me nervous to be in charge of making coffee. As any half-decent diner owner will tell you, coffee is the lifeblood that makes everything tick. Before any daily decisions are made, important or mundane, coffee must precede it. My manager would make me peddle it as fast as possible, as customers tended to be a lot more tolerable of delays after their first-morning cup.

And we would definitely have delays today. Mandy, the cute waitress who had dimples you could die for, was moving out west to pursue an acting career in LA, so we all got together and had a few beers in the parking lot at night before we moved the party to Mandy’s place… and well, you know how those things go. Most of us showed up today for our shift, but Joe and Fred, two of our line cooks, conveniently called out with “unexpected food poisoning” as that was more of a socially acceptable way to justify their habitual vomiting.

I didn’t drink but went along to Mandy’s for a bit. I told myself it was because we hadn’t had a night like this in ages (hell even Angela was going), but I was curious to know what Mandy was like. What made her special? It felt weird being envious, but that’s exactly how I felt. After a quick inspection of her apartment, it was just what I expected… normal in every way. I found it comforting. Perhaps this meant that my moment was just beyond the horizon, far enough not to see, but still there, awaiting discovery.

Before long, I left Mandy’s. As I made my way toward the front door, Angela tugged my sleeve and protested my departure. She tried to hand me a beer, but I told her I had to see Kyle. She nodded her head and smiled. She liked him, so she didn’t give me too much shit over it. In fact, pretty much everyone liked him.

After work, I typically tried to head straight to my boyfriend Kyle’s place, to spend a couple of hours with him before he passed out for work. He always had to get up really early in the morning for his construction job and it always felt unfair keeping him up later than necessary since he was just staying up to spend time with me.

As soon as I got to his apartment, I threw my arms around him and gave him a long passionate kiss… and then headed straight for the shower. I smelled like coffee. Even long after I’ve taken off my apron, showered, changed into new clothes, and spritz myself with a perfume (usually with base notes of jasmine and vanilla), the scent of coffee still lingers on me like an Egyptian curse.

“Babe, stop sniffing yourself, you don’t smell like coffee at all. How many times do I have to tell you, it’s just psychological,” laughed Kyle.

I smile back, but that doesn’t stop me from still sniffing myself. 

“Well, what are you smelling today? Arabica? Robusta?” Kyle said in a cheeky manner.

“Robusta, unfortunately. You know we choose caffeine over taste every time at the diner,” I lament.

“Yeah, I’m sure it doesn’t hurt that it trades at a lower price too.”

“Hey, gotta turn a profit somehow right?”

He smiles. Through everything that has happened recently, Kyle has been that one fixture that hasn’t changed. Well, that and the diner (to be fair, mostly just Dotty).

Even though it’s been a year since the accident, I still have trouble talking about it. While I’m OK during the day, at night it’s a different story. I want to sleep so badly, but my mind just races. 5mg of Ambien usually does the trick, but unfortunately, nothing can stop the nightmares from occurring. At first, I thought that it was a side effect of me already being on Prozac, but even when I’m off it, it’s still the same. They’ve gotten so bad that I usually fall asleep on the couch after Kyle passes out. I’ve unintentionally woken him up too many times that it’s just easier this way. He says he doesn’t mind, but I can’t help but feel like a burden lately. Even when I smile and it’s genuine, it still feels like I’m going through the motions. Sometimes I wish I had died that winter day. Once I said it out loud and it was the only time Kyle yelled at me. I never said it again. He really did love me.

While I was often confident in our relationship when he was awake, at night it was a different story. Sometimes I’d stare at his face while he was sleeping and it seemed so foreign to me. It’s amazing how you can sleep next to someone day in day out for years and still not notice things about them. Every crease and wrinkle on his face felt like undiscovered territory… a desultory scouting expedition on my part, at best.

He always furrowed his brow when he slept, which was such a sharp contrast to how he appeared around me. In fact, I can’t recall Kyle ever being annoyed around me. No, in all aspects he really was a perfect boyfriend… but something was distinctly off, and I couldn’t put my finger on it, which is why I wasn’t sure how I’d break the news to him. I just wish I could get more information from him without telling him. That way I’d know exactly what to do.

I read a science fiction story where they were able to shrink down a crew and they had a tiny ship that was to be implanted in the ear canal, where they would slowly make their way toward the brain. I think it was to do surgery or something like that, but I liked to pretend I could take that fun size vessel and go directly into Kyle’s dreams. I always wondered what he dreamt of at night.

Since I worked a double shift on the weekends, I typically would have Monday off which meant I’d wake up early to fix Kyle a nice meal before he headed to work. This was usually when we did the bulk of our talking as he was beyond exhausted at night. Even getting him to stay up until 11 PM was a chore, which is why we rarely went out late.

In the morning, as I buttered his whole-wheat toast, I couldn’t stop thinking about his furrowed brow. What else didn’t I know about him? How much do we really know about anyone? Before I could ponder this further, I felt a tangent growing deep inside of me. Eventually, it got so massive it burst open.

“Do you think anything we do in life really matters?” I said in a manner that made Kyle stop chewing his scrambled eggs. He rarely ever broke stride while eating.

“Wow Claire, you sure know how to make casual conversation,” he said smirking. 

I loved his smirk. I always felt at ease when he did that.

“I’m serious. Do you?” I said, not letting him get off the hook so easily, even with his endearing smile.

“Yes, I do.”

“Why?”

“I dunno, Claire, I just do… just like the birds chirp in the morning and the bees make honey.”

“Ah,” I said, wondering if I should keep pushing or not. The smirk wasn’t there anymore so I couldn’t tell how he was feeling about all of this, especially before a busy workday. Eventually, he broke the silence.

“Do you?” he said, finally returning to his scrambled eggs and toast, but not at the usual fervor I am accustomed to.

“Do you want a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ type answer?” I asked.

“Is that possible with you Claire?”

I smirk. “No, I suppose not.”

I guess my smirk wasn’t as reassuring as his because he still wasn’t back to his usual gallop; there was still a bit of hesitancy while he ate. Or maybe, he was just tired of these types of conversations. Or maybe, he was just tired of me? Or maybe, I was just overthinking everything like usual. He was staring at me. How long was I zoned out for?

“I’m not really sure why I asked that… OK, OK, I’m rambling. Give me a quick second to compose myself,” I said, clearly thrown off even though I had posed the question in the first place.

“Take your time,” he said, digging into his eggs.

We sat in silence… until we didn’t.

“Kyle, did you know that the sun is going to explode in five billion years?”

“No, that’s news to me.”

“When I was around seven, I learned this. I forgot about it until today. I was making coffee at the diner and the memory came back. I remember, our first-grade teacher told us.”

“Miss Looney?”

“I think so.”

“I had a crush on her.”

“You and all the rest of the boys in the class,” I chortled.

“Yeah, if she was available, I’m not sure we’d even be dating Claire. I mean, you’re pretty stellar, but Miss Looney? Oh, man.”

I playfully threw my toast crust at him. He caught it in the air and took a big bite. I guess his appetite was back.

“Anywayyyy, it must have affected me because as soon as I came home, my mother knew something was wrong. She said I had the same look on my face when I found out that my father was Santa Claus.

My mom asked me what was wrong, and I told her that ‘the sun was going to explode in five billion years.’ She snickered at first but quickly stopped when she saw I was on the verge of crying.

She said to me, ‘Honey, five billion years is a very long time from now. Why are you so worried about that?’

‘I’m afraid of the dark’, I told her.

‘Well sweetie, I think that’s the last of our problems.’

I was confused by her response. To me, there was nothing scarier than the dark. So I asked her, ‘What do you mean?’

Now at this point, my mother had probably realized that she was about to open Pandora’s box, and tried to back peddle, but I wouldn’t give it a rest. I needed to know, and eventually, after enough pestering, she gave in. With a sigh, she told me, ‘Because we’ll be long dead before that.’

Kyle, at this point, the only time I had even heard of death was when my pet goldfish died from an accidental pH mishap, stemming from a bleach spill while the fish tank was getting cleaned. This was well before my dad died when I hadn’t even realized that humans COULD die, but now I was abruptly getting the full picture. Albeit rudimentary in nature, that was the first time I realized I was going to die… that we were all going to expire. And that night I cried and cried, but that wasn’t the reason I was so low-spirited. No, I sobbed because my night light broke, and I was afraid of the dark. I had just found out that I was going to eventually pass away, but it was the night light not working that caused me to bawl. In fact, when my mother told me I was going to die I smiled, which confused her. She asked me, ‘Why are you smiling Claire dear?’ and I told her it was because I was going to see my fish again.”

“Claire, I’m sorry to interrupt, but I’m totally confused. Where are you going with this? You know I’m not smart like you are.”

I hated it when he did that. He always made it sound like I was some sort of brainiac when I mentioned these types of topics, but doesn’t everyone think about these things from time to time? Either way, I continued.

“Well, I think people sometimes feel that their actions have no meaning because they see themselves as a single ripple in an ocean. The presence or absence of that single ripple doesn’t really do much to affect the ocean one way or another. But imagine that same ripple in a puddle of some sort. Then the ripple becomes more like a tidal wave. If we only look at our meaning compared to the macrocosm, then sure, it’s easy to feel that our lives are insignificant. 

I mean Kyle, the earth is but a speck of dust in an ant’s eye in the grand scheme of the universe, which makes you or me probably less than a speck of dust, on a speck of dust, in an ant’s eye. If we view life like that, it’s hard to think our actions hold significance, but to an ant? You might as well be a God! One misplaced step from you is a matter of life and death, hardly what I would describe as insignificant. That night light couldn’t even hold a candle compared to the sun, but to me it’s significance was of the utmost importance. To me, it was the difference between a good night’s rest, and one filled with nightmares.”

“Huh. Never thought about it like that,” he said while checking his watch.

“Claire Bear, I gotta go. Can we continue this when I get back?” he said, already gathering his belongings.

I felt a bit of a disconnect, but he was always so sweet that I didn’t want to press the subject.

“Sure, I’ll see you when you get home,” I said while leaning on my tippy toes to meet him halfway as he dipped down to kiss me. Sometimes he was so tall I think I would need a ladder to reach those soft lips of his.

He grabbed his keys off the front table and took his hard hat off the hat rack I got him for Christmas. I figured it would make it easier for him to find if it was always in the same place. It appeared to work. If only I could come up with quick workarounds to deal with our feelings and communication issues, but Kyle wasn’t a hat. He wasn’t some object I could put in its correct place. You can’t make simple solutions for complex beings and even the simplest human being is complex in one facet or another.

Sometimes I wondered if Kyle and I were on the same page. I always talked about how when I finally got the chance to go back to school and I was able to secure a better job and we were more financially sound, that we could travel around the world. He always said yes, but I always wondered if he was just acting as my personal echo chamber. Kyle was polite to a fault, the byproduct of dating your best friend since kindergarten.

Kyle had only been out of the country twice in his life. Once to see Niagara Falls from the Canadian side (to see if it was the same as the American side) and to Cancun for his brother’s bachelor party. To him, the edge of the world might as well just be Saylorville Lake, just north of the Des Moines River. I wasn’t any better. Besides a few vacations down south and a school trip to California, I hadn’t done much exploring myself, but it always bothered me.

I didn’t know how he did it. He was just content being normal. In fact, I think he prided himself on it. However, it was always a hard pill for me to swallow… that maybe this was all there was. The mere mention of it made my chest tighten up. I always told myself it was the slow deaths in life that get most people in the end.

I have always been a bit of a space case. The mysteries of life always created intrigue for me, even when I was a kid. I felt most people that I met in life did the opposite. It is a very human trait to try to put things in “place”. With this logic, UFOs become planes with low flight trajectories, Sasquatch becomes an oversized bear, and dragons only waltz between the fictitious pages of a children’s storybook. When the unexplainable is still unexplainable, society, as a whole, writes it off as a freak occurrence derived from probabilistic nature. But sometimes isn’t it fun to dream?

I had to get out of this town because while it was comfortable, it was the most normal thing I could imagine. Middle American town, with Middle American people. Good salt of the earth human beings, but I was dying to see New York City and feel that energy. I almost felt guilty saying it. But I couldn’t go even if I wanted to. On top of that, there was still the elephant in the room to address. Fuck. For one second, I had almost forgotten about THAT.

I had to tell him tonight. Yeah, I’d do it after he came back from work. We’d take a drive and go get burgers and shakes from that place he’s been dying to go to and maybe catch a drive-in movie. He loves going to the movies and I can’t remember the last time we did it. I’ll drive so that if he ends up passing out during the film I can take him back home early. Moments like this made me feel so selfish for wanting more. Kyle literally was the best thing in my life and all I could think about was my own dreams coming to fruition.

That being said, while I loved Kyle dearly, I just was so damn tired of feeling defective. It’s a weird sensation to be content and far from at the same time. Kyle, just like my coffee grinding, seemed more like a temporary solution to what was going on in my head, and the thought alone was making my mind race.

All of a sudden, the oxygen left the room. At first, it didn’t bother me; I assumed it was just a slight hiccup in my body’s mechanics, but as time continued to tick, I began to panic. No matter how hard I tried to inhale, it felt as if I was trying to breathe through a tiny straw. The harder I breathed in, the less oxygen I got. My skin started to feel clammy and my hands began to shake. I was running out of time; I had to get this weight off of my chest immediately, but I didn’t know how to do so on my own. Kyle could easily lift this weight, but he wasn’t around. Absolutely tragic.

As my symptoms worsened, I lowered myself to the frigid, kitchen floor, and curled up in a tiny ball. My vision was blurry. Was I dying? No, shut up Claire. I had to think logically. I knew this was a panic attack, but the fear was taking over my mind. Then again maybe this wasn’t a panic attack. Maybe I really was dying? I began to tear up.

It was moments like this that I craved my brother’s presence. I felt a void that I was almost confident could never be filled by anyone or anything on this planet. I was a shell of my former self and while I wouldn’t admit it to anyone out loud, it was impossible to lie to myself. I was distracting myself, hoping that time would heal these wounds, but it was getting so much harder. Everything reminded me of him. A half-eaten cereal bowl, the scent of vanilla… all of these, just constant reminders of the fickleness of living and loving.

At best I could distract myself, but the only true moments of reprieve were when I saw him, usually in the mirror, mostly when I smiled, but these moments were so far and few these days. It’s hard to be happy when you’re not, no matter how hard you try to fake it.

And just like that, it passed. I could breathe again. I wasn’t sure how much time had passed by… thirty seconds can feel like an eternity when you feel like you’re dying. When I eventually did get up, I splashed some water on my face, drank an ocean’s worth of it as well, took off my clothes as they felt too restrictive, and went straight to bed. Perhaps my dreams could give me the solace I couldn’t find in the waking world. I saw the patterns again, but they did nothing for me. Just phosphenes.