Eclipse

So there I was, waitressing away at my side gig on Wed night, when all of a sudden BAM! people started pushing away their pho, pulling out their chairs and stumbling into the glow of the moon. Half of it, anyways.

I joined them, notepad and pen still in hand, neck craned, to stare at the slowly disappearing orb emptily. This should have been an ecstatic experience. I should have been blinded with fear and sudden darkness. Had I been living in a time before electricity or way the heck out in the middle of nowhere, it would have been. I would have ripped off my clothes and run naked towards the place where the moon should have been, begging the gods of the sky to take me instead.

Me, the lowly woman. The woman who delivers spring rolls and edits the unrehearsed writing of college students. The woman who reads books, only to regurgitate them on paper, meshing the words of the authors with her own narrow thoughts.

But standing on the sidewalk along Colorado Blvd, surrounded by the glare of headlights and streetlamps and billboards, I felt hollow. It didn't matter if the moon went out. I needn't have called it back to light my way home or to illuminate my hunt for dinner.

The blank patch of dusky sky could have been any moonless stretch of space. No part of me felt the need for self-sacrifice. And I walked back inside aided by a neon-green electric glow. And I ate my dinner out of a styrofoam box.