Alice

‘Oh, the sun is surely sinking down, but the moon is slowly rising, so this old world must still be spinning round’, Alice sang to herself as she made her way slowly up the hill toward her apartment.  It had been a long day at the diner where she has been working since she was 17. At 59 she was still able to keep up with the young waitresses, and to her credit she liked most of them too, even the ones with tattoos and nose rings. Alice never could understand the need to ornament the body God gave you like a Christmas Tree the way these young women did, but in her long life at the diner she’d seen about every iteration of  body enhancement there was walk through the door and these girls were just keeping up.
Alice recalled how her mother and father had ridiculed her for wanting to get her ears pierced. That was a lifetime ago. They had so many rules to keep her from projecting the wrong image, attract the wrong guy, take the wrong turn, end up pregnant. The list was suffocating.  Alice laughed to herself at that.  If they only knew the fear they had struck into her, they would have known that there was no way Alice was ever going to screw up. She practically constructed her own chastity belt to keep herself pure.  Consequently Alice had few long term relationships. Men who were attracted to her were turned off by her prudish behavior. After her last relationship ended she gave up trying to relax and enjoy a man’s companionship all together.  So she lived vicariously through the young women who worked alongside her at the diner. She imagined herself in their shoes, but could only imagine so much, as she had no frame of reference.
Some nights, sitting quietly in her empty apartment, she would recall relationships that had come and gone.  There were a few that now, remembering their sweetness, gave her heart a pang of regret to have lost.  In every heart there is a room, a sanctuary safe and strong, to heal the wounds from lovers past, until a new one comes along.