genre: fantasy
location: 24 hour diner
object: stretcher

free associate.

there was a period of my life when i was an insomniac. it was a very unhappy period of my life.

i would periodically travel between los angeles and fremont. the anguish always found me, tinging the edges of my periphery with something terrifying and unexpected. it waited for me to let my guard down.

i was always looking for public places where i could sit and be alone. i could never be more alone than in a public place, with people engaged in their own worlds, having no idea of the outsider in the room. these times were my salvation. to be alone in my own home, the silence had eyes. the silence had teeth. behind every door, a shadow. its echoes roared through me, and as always, that which loomed at the edge of my vision. the only escape was to disappear inside the outside world.

one night, i went to the local denny's.

denny's, the local shit diner. 24 hours but the people working there are so heavy, you can almost see the weight of life physically bend their body into resigned forms. there was one particular waitress with dark, leathery skin and curly hair. sometimes, i wondered when she was alone, if she'd ever raised her head towards the sky and wished for an end. she looked like she would give anything in the world just to rest.

i went in after midnight, after hours at the gym until closing didn't wear me down. i was so tired but my body and mind constantly buzzing, like the giant power lines loping over our streets we'd grown up with (some say they whispered cancer into our ears), the persistence of their noise overpowering the night landscapes. i'd brought a deck of cards and a notebook. i ordered a cup of coffee from the server, a tired guy with black hair and a slight hunch, somewhere in his 20's.

i took all the face cards out of the deck leaving only the numerical cards. for the next 2 hours, i shuffled them and turned them over one by one, trying to project the upcoming cards. i hoped to be more accurate than statistically probable. i hoped to find a way to see, to connect the unknown to the known. outside of my server asking me what i was doing with the cards, everyone left me alone. everyone has their own problems.

by 3am, it was just the manager, my server and a cook out back in the kitchen. everyone looked dazed from exhaustion. i could barely keep my head up--it was echoing so badly it made me dizzy, and i was just sitting there, waiting. waiting for something to happen, anything. anything that might shake us out of this bottomless world that lacked imagination.